honours, and no deity that
pities, is more destructive of all higher effort than any conflict with
tyranny or with barbarism.

* * *

Yet as he thought, so he did not realise that he would ever cease to be
in the world--who does? Life was still young in him, was prodigal to him
of good gifts; of enmity he only knew so much as made his triumph finer,
and of love he had more than enough. His life was full--at times
laborious--but always poetical and always victorious. He could not
realise that the day of darkness would ever come for him, when neither
woman nor man would delight him, when no roses would have fragrance for
him, and no song any spell to rouse him. Genius gives immortality in
another way than in the vulgar one of being praised by others after
death; it gives elasticity, unwearied sympathy, and that sense of some
essence stronger than death, of some spirit higher than the tomb, which
nothing can destroy. It is in this sense that genius walks with the
immortals.

* * *

A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they
run.

* * *

You may weep your eyes blind, you may shout your throat dry, you may
deafen the ears of your world for half a lifetime, and you may never get
a truth believed in, never have a simple fact accredited. But the lie
flies like the swallow, multiplies itself like the caterpillar, is
accepted everywhere, like the visits of a king; it is a royal guest for
whom the gates fly open, the red carpet is unrolled, the trumpets sound,
the crowds applaud.

* * *

She lived, like all women of her stamp and her epoch, in an atmosphere
of sugared sophisms; she never reflected, she never admitted, that she
did wrong; in her world nothing mattered much, unless, indeed, it were
found out, and got into the public mouth.

Shifting as the sands, shallow as the rain-pools, drifting in all danger
to a lie, incapable of loyalty, insatiably curious, still as a friend
and ill as a foe, kissing like Judas, denying like Peter, impure of
thought, even where by physical bias or political prudence still pure in
act, the woman of modern society is too often at once the feeblest and
the foulest outcome of a false civilisation. Useless as a butterfly,
corrupt as a canker, untrue to even lovers and friends because mentally
incapable of comprehending what truth means, caring only for physical
comfort and mental incli