bumpkins would let it be.

* * *

Love that remembers aught save the one beloved may be affection, but it
is not love.

* * *

Ariel could not combat a leopardess; Ithuriel's spear glances pointless
from a rhinoceros' hide. To match what is low and beat it, you must
stoop, and soil your hands to cut a cudgel rough and ready. She did not
see this; and seeing it, would not have lowered herself to do it.

* * *

Which is the truth, which is the madness?--when the artist, in the
sunlit ice of a cold dreamland, scorns love and adores but one art; or
when the artist, amidst the bruised roses of a garden of passion, finds
all heaven in one human heart?

* * *

There is a story in an old poet's forgotten writings of a woman who was
queen when the world was young, and reigned over many lands, and loved a
captive, and set him free, and thinking to hurt him less by seeming
lowly, came down from her throne and laid her sceptre in the dust, and
passed amongst the common maidens that drew water at the well, or begged
at the city gate, and seemed as one of them, giving him all and keeping
nought herself: "so will he love me more," she thought; but he, crowned
king, thought only of the sceptre and the throne, and having those,
looked not amongst the women at the gate, and knew her not, because what
he had loved had been a queen. Thus she, self-discrowned, lost both her
lover and her kingdom. A wise man amongst the throng said to her, "Nay,
you should have kept aloof upon your golden seat and made him feel your
power to deal life or death, and fretted him long, and long kept him in
durance and in doubt, you, meanwhile, far above. For men are light
creatures as the moths are."

* * *

They had lived in London and Paris all their lives, and had, before
this, heard patriotism used as a reason for a variety of things, from a
minister's keeping in office against the will of the country, to a
newspaper's writing a country into bloodshed and bankruptcy; they were
quite aware of the word's elasticity.

* * *

It was the true and perfect springtide of the year, when Love walks
amongst the flowers, and comes a step nearer what it seeks with every
dawn.

Without Love, spring is of all seasons cruel; more cruel than all frost
and frown of winter.

* * *

In the early days of an illicit passion con