ly loves the high-crested wave, the abyss of the deep sea.

* * *

Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be
pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

* * *

It is this narrowness of the peasant mind which philosophers never
fairly understand, and demagogues understand but too well, and warp to
their own selfish purposes and profits.

* * *

Flying, the flamingoes are like a sunset cloud; walking, they are like
slender spirals of flame traversing the curling foam. When one looks on
them across black lines of storm-blown weeds on a November morning in
the marshes, as their long throats twist in the air with the flexile
motion of the snake, the grace of a lily blown by wind, one thinks of
Thebes, of Babylon, of the gorgeous Persia of Xerxes, of the lascivious
Egypt of the Ptolemies.

The world has grown grey and joyless in the twilight of age and fatigue,
but these birds keep the colour of its morning. Eos has kissed them.

* * *

For want of a word lives often drift apart.

* * *

Nausicaa, in the safe shelter of her father's halls, had never tended
Odysseus with more serenity and purity than the daughter of Saturnino
tended his fellow-slave.

The sanctity of the tombs lay on them, the dead were so near; neither
profanity nor passion seemed to have any place here in this mysterious
twilight alive with the memories of a vanished people. Her innocence was
a grand and noble thing, like any one of the largest white lilies that
rose up from the noxious mud of the marshes; a cup of ivory wet with the
dewdrops of dawn, blossoming fair on fetid waters. And in him the
languor of sickness and of despair borrowed unconsciously for awhile the
liveries of chastity; and he spoke no word, he made no gesture, that
would have scared from its original calm the soul of this lonely
creature, who succoured him with so much courage and so much compassion
that they awed him with the sense of an eternal, infinite, and
overwhelming obligation. It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a
great gratitude.

To a great nature it gives wings that bear it up to heaven; a lower
nature feels it always a clog that impatiently is dragged only so long
as force compels.

* * *

Her daily labours remained the same, but it seemed to her as if she had
the strength of