Readings from Carlyle

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Blackie, 1894 - 270 pages
 

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Page 255 - My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone!
Page 14 - It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent.
Page 50 - If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom, immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour ; all else Is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.
Page 40 - Death ; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee ! Hast thou not a heart ; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be ; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee 1 Let it come, then ; I will meet it and defy it...
Page 254 - Ay, now am I in Arden ; the more fool I : when I was at home, I was in a better place : but travellers must be content.
Page 55 - Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away? — Ghosts! There are nigh a thousandmillion walking the Earth openly at noontide; some halfhundred have vanished from it, some...
Page 38 - ... all void of Life, of Purpose, Of Volition, even of Hostility : it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death ! Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God...
Page 162 - Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. 5 The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath.
Page 101 - Si vis me flere, is applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, we might say : Be true, if you would be believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him.
Page 257 - For then he was inspired, and from him came, As from the Pythian's mystic cave of yore, Those oracles which set the world in flame, Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more...

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