he rising and the setting of a sun.

* * *

But he was not obstinate. He only stretched towards the light he saw, as
the plant in the cellar will stretch through the bars.

Tens of millions of little peasants come to the birth, and grow up and
become men, and do the daily bidding of the world, and work and die, and
have no more of soul or Godhead in them than the grains of sand. But
here and there, with no lot different from his fellows, one is born to
dream and muse and struggle to the sun of higher desires, and the world
calls such a one Burns, or Haydn, or Giotto, or Shakespeare, or whatever
name the fierce light of fame may burn upon and make irridescent.

* * *

The mighty lives have passed away into silence, leaving no likeness to
them on earth; but if you would still hold communion with them, even
better than to go to written score or printed book or painted panel or
chiselled marble or cloistered gloom is it to stray into one of these
old quiet gardens, where for hundreds of years the stone naiad has
leaned over the fountain, and the golden lizard hidden under the fallen
caryatide, and sit quite still, and let the stones tell you what they
remember, and the leaves say what the sun once saw; and then the shades
of the great dead will come to you. Only you must love them truly, else
you will see them never.

* * *

"How he loves that thing already--as he never will love me," thought
Bruno, looking down at him in the starlight, with that dull sense of
hopeless rivalry and alien inferiority which the self-absorption of
genius inflicts innocently and unconsciously on the human affections
that cling to it, and which later on love avenges upon it in the same
manner.

* * *

Who can look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xenophon, without a wish
that the charm of those unknown limits and those untraversed seas was
ours?--without an irresistible sense that to have sailed away, in
vaguest hazard, into the endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must
have had a sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted
from the "tour of the world in ninety days."

* * *

Fair faiths are the blossoms of life. When the faith drops, spring is
over.

* * *

In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The
field-labourer of northern counties may be but a hapless hind, hedging
and ditchin