Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She put the card away in her desk; the ink and the blotter she hid in the cupboard together with the peevish steel nib that jabbed paper, and that richly deserved cremation. Then she straightened the chairs and threw away the litter, after which she went in search of a duster; one by one she dusted the few remaining volumes in the bookcase, including the Bibliothèque Rose. She arranged her dictation notebooks in a pile with others that were far less accurately written—books of sums, mostly careless and marked with a cross; books of English history, in one of which Stephen had begun to write the history of the horse! Books of geography with Mademoiselle’s comments in strong purple ink: ‘Grand manque d’attention.’ And lastly she collected the torn lesson books that had lain on their backs, on their sides, on their bellies—anyhow, anywhere in drawers or in cupboards, but not very often in the bookcase. For the bookcase was harbouring quite other things, a motley and most unstudious collection; dumb-bells, wooden and iron, of varying sizes—some Indian clubs, one split off at the handle—cotton laces, for gym shoes, the belt of a tunic. And then stable keepsakes, including a headband that Raftery had worn on some special occasion; a miniature horseshoe kicked sky-high by Collins; a half-eaten carrot, now withered and mouldy, and two hunting crops that had both lost their lashes and were waiting to visit the saddler. Stephen considered, rubbing her chin—a habit which by now had become automatic—she finally decided on the ample box-sofa as a seemly receptacle. Remained only the carrot, and she stood for a long time with it clasped in her hand, disturbed and unhappy—this clearing of decks for stern mental action was certainly very depressing. But at last she threw the thing into the fire, where it shifted distressfully, sizzling and humming. Then she sat down and stared rather grimly at the flames that were burning up Raftery’s first carrot. CHAPTER 71S oon after the departure of Mademoiselle Duphot, there occurred two distinct innovations at Morton. Miss Puddleton arrived to take possession of the schoolroom, and Sir Philip bought himself a motor-car. The motor was a Panhard, and it caused much excitement in the neighbourhood of Upton-on-Severn. Conservative, suspicious of all innovations, people had abstained from motors in the Midlands, and, incredible as it now seems to look back on, Sir Philip was regarded as a kind of pioneer. The Panhard was a high-shouldered, snub-nosed abortion with a loud, vulgar voice and an uncertain temper. It suffered from frequent fits of dyspepsia, brought about by an unhealthy spark-plug. Its seats were the very acme of discomfort, its primitive gears unhandy and noisy, but nevertheless it could manage to attain to a speed of about fifteen miles per hour—given always that, by God’s good grace and the chauffeur’s, it was not in the throes of indigestion.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  We had frequently discussed that this time in our lives with our kids at home was precious and fleeting and that we would have countless years alone together in the future – why so much rancor about it all of a sudden? As far as I could see, happiness as an overarching goal was momentarily irrelevant. We needed to get through his business plight, my mother’s health crisis, support Daisy through her senior year of high school, and in general live our lives with a little less angst. Happy? How about we strive not to totally fall apart? Over the next few weeks, I tried a new approach with Michael to force a reintroduction of happiness into our home. During the day, I commuted uptown to accompany my mother to doctor appointments and cook meals for her, squeezing in my responsibilities as PTA president at Daisy’s school and racing back downtown in time to pick Georgia up from school. When Michael came home from work, I greeted him cheerfully and asked if I could heat up dinner for him. I offered glasses of wine and inquired about his day, and when the kids needed homework help or it was time to put Georgia to bed, I did it all without glancing his way to see if he might help. Every few days I asked him if he could find time to talk to me, but he said he was consumed with work and I didn’t press it – I wanted to show him that I could be supportive and loving and not the nag he had accused me of being. On Valentine’s Day, I arrived home from the gym to find Daisy eating a late breakfast at the counter next to a vase of flowers nestled in a delivery box from the florist. I frowned at them, asking her where they had come from. She shrugged, saying they had just been delivered and she assumed they were from Michael. The flowers looked sculptural, overly precious and arranged too deliberately. I riffled through the tissue paper in the box, looking for a card, but there wasn’t one. I texted Michael, asking if he had sent me flowers, and he replied that he had, that they were from a new flower shop near his office that was owned by the woman who used to arrange flowers for Barack Obama when he was in the White House. “What a strange choice,” I muttered out loud. “These are so fancy.” “Mom!” Daisy reprimanded me. “That’s so rude! Dad sends you flowers for Valentine’s Day and you complain that you don’t like them?” “Sorry, I know how I sound ungrateful. It’s just ... Dad knows I like cheap bodega flowers, these are too fussy.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  removed from where she was staying and taken elsewhere. Thinking that Constant was motivated by brotherly love and not by his love for the woman, the Duchess said that she would be only too pleased, provided it could be carried out in such a way that the Duke never discovered that she had given her consent to the scheme. Constant reassured her completely on this point, and accordingly the Duchess gave him permission to proceed in whatever way he considered best. The first thing he did was to fit out a fast boat in secret, which one evening, having informed his men on board what they were to do, he sent to a spot near the garden of the place where the lady was living. Then he went there with another group of his men, to be amicably received by her retainers as well as by the lady herself, who, at her visitor’s suggestion, accompanied Constant and his companions into the garden, whilst her servants trailed along behind. As though he wished to impart some message from the Duke, he then led her off alone in the direction of a gate, overlooking the sea, which had already been unlocked by one of his accomplices. At a given signal, the boat nosed her way inshore, and having had the lady seized and bundled quickly aboard, he turned to her servants, saying: ‘Unless you want to be killed, don’t move or make any sound. It is not my intention to steal the Duke’s mistress, but to remove the injury he does to my sister.’ Since nobody dared offer any reply, Constant embarked with his men, settled himself next to the lady, who was crying, and ordered them to cast off and start rowing. And they plied their oars to such good effect that just before dawn on the following day they arrived at Aegina. 10 Going ashore there in order to rest, Constant amused himself in the company of the lady, who was bitterly bewailing her ill-starred beauty. Then they boarded the ship once again, and a few days later they arrived at Chios, 11 where Constant decided to remain, for he thought he would be safe there from his father’s strictures and from the possibility of having to surrender the stolen woman. For several days, the fair lady bemoaned her misfortune. Eventually, however, she responded to Constant’s efforts at consoling her, and began, as on previous occasions, to derive pleasure from the fate to which Fortune had consigned her. And this was how matters stood when Uzbek, 12 who was at that time the King of the Turks and who was constantly at war with the Emperor, happened to pass through Smyrna, where he learned that Constant was leading a dissolute life on Chios with some stolen mistress of his, leaving himself wide open to attack.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The bath over, and Stephen garbed in her nightgown, a long pause would ensue, known as: ‘Waiting for Mother,’ and if mother, for some reason, did not happen to arrive, the pause could be spun out for quite twenty minutes, or for half an hour even, if luck was with Stephen, and the nursery clock not too precise and old-maidish. ‘Now come on, say your prayers;’ Mrs. Bingham would order, ‘and you’d better ask the dear Lord to forgive you—impious I calls it, and you a young lady! Carrying on because you can’t be a boy!’ Stephen would kneel by the side of the bed, but in such moods as these her prayers would sound angry. The nurse would protest: ‘Not so loud, Miss Stephen! Pray slower, and don’t shout at the Lord, He won’t like it!’ But Stephen would continue to shout at the Lord in a kind of impotent defiance. CHAPTER 41T he sorrows of childhood are mercifully passing, for it is only when maturity has rendered soil mellow that grief will root very deeply. Stephen’s grief for Collins, in spite of its violence, or perhaps because of that very violence, wore itself out like a passing tempest and was all but spent by the autumn. By Christmas, the gusts when they came were quite gentle, rousing nothing more disturbing than a faint melancholy—by Christmas it required quite an effort of will to recapture the charm of Collins. Stephen was nonplussed and rather uneasy; to have loved so greatly and now to forget! It made her feel childish and horribly silly, as though she had cried over cutting her finger. As on all grave occasions, she considered the Lord, remembering His love for miserable sinners: ‘Teach me to love Collins Your way,’ prayed Stephen, trying hard to squeeze out some tears in the process, ‘teach me to love her ’cause she’s mean and unkind and won’t be a proper sinner that repenteth.’ But the tears would not come, nor was prayer what it had been; it lacked something—she no longer sweated when she prayed. Then an awful thing happened, the maid’s image was fading, and try as she would Stephen could not recall certain passing expressions that had erstwhile allured her. Now she could not see Collins’ face at all clearly even if she willed very hard in the dark. Thoroughly disgruntled, she bethought her of books, books of fairy tales, hitherto not much in favour, especially of those that treated of spells, incantations and other unlawful proceedings. She even requested the surprised Mrs. Bingham to read from the Bible: ‘You know where,’ coaxed Stephen, ‘it’s the place they were reading in church last Sunday, about Saul and a witch with a name like Edna—the place where she makes some person come up, ’cause the king had forgotten what he looked like.’

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Take the people round here, do you think they like me?’ Then Stephen, who had not yet learnt to dissemble, stared hard at her shoes, in embarrassed silence. Just outside the door a clock boomed seven. Stephen started; she had been there nearly three hours. ‘I must go,’ she said, getting abruptly to her feet, ‘you look tired, I’ve been making a visitation. ’ Her hostess made no effort to retain her: ‘Well,’ she smiled, ‘come again, please come very often—that is if you won’t find it dull, Miss Gordon; we’re terribly quiet here at The Grange.’ 3 Stephen drove home slowly, for now that it was over she felt like a machine that had suddenly run down. Her nerves were relaxed, she was thoroughly tired, yet she rather enjoyed this unusual sensation. The hot June evening was heavy with thunder. From somewhere in the distance came the bleating of sheep, and the melancholy sound seemed to blend and mingle with her mood, which was now very gently depressed. A gentle but persistent sense of depression enveloped her whole being like a soft, grey cloak; and she did not wish to shake off this cloak, but rather to fold it more closely around her. At Morton she stopped the car by the lakes and sat staring through the trees at the glint of water. For a long while she sat there without knowing why, unless it was that she wished to remember. But she found that she could not even be certain of the kind of dress that Angela had worn—it had been of some soft stuff, that much she remembered, so soft that it had easily torn, for the rest her memories of it were vague—though she very much wanted to remember that dress. A faint rumble of thunder came out of the west, where the clouds were banking up ominously purple. Some uncertain and rather hysterical swallows flew high and then low at the sound of the thunder. Her sense of depression was now much less gentle, it increased every moment, turning to sadness. She was sad in spirit and mind and body—her body felt dejected, she was sad all over. And now some one was whistling down by the stables, old Williams, she suspected, for the whistle was tuneless. The loss of his teeth had disgruntled his whistle; yes, she was sure that that must be Williams. A horse whinnied as one bucket clanked against another—sounds came clearly this evening; they were watering the horses. Anna’s young carriage horses would be pawing their straw, impatient because they were feeling thirsty. Then a gate slammed. That would be the gate of the meadow where the heifers were pastured—it was yellow with king-cups. One of the men from the home farm was going his rounds, securing all gates before sunset. Something dropped on the bonnet of the car with a ping.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The stove was too small and at times it smelt vilely. The distempered grey walls were a mass of stains, for whenever it hailed or rained or snowed the windows and skylight would always start dripping. The furniture consisted of a few shaky chairs, a table, a divan and a hired grand piano. Nearly every one seated themselves on the floor, robbing the divan of its moth-eaten cushions. From the studio there led off a tiny room with an eye-shaped window that would not open. In this room had been placed a narrow camp-bed to which Jamie retired when she felt extra sleepless. For the rest, there was a sink with a leaky tap; a cupboard in which they kept crème-de-menthe, what remnants of food they possessed at the moment, Jamie’s carpet slippers and blue jean jacket—minus which she could never compose a note—and the pail, cloths and brushes with which Barbara endeavoured to keep down the accumulating dirt and confusion. For Jamie with her tow-coloured head in the clouds, was not only short-sighted but intensely untidy. Dust meant little to her since she seldom saw it, while neatness was completely left out of her make-up; considering how limited were her possessions, the chaos they produced was truly amazing. Barbara would sigh and would quite often scold—when she scolded she reminded one of a wren who was struggling to discipline a large cuckoo. ‘Jamie, your dirty shirt, give it to me—leaving it there on the piano, whatever!’ Or, ‘Jamie, come here and look at your hair-brush; if you haven’t gone and put it next-door to the butter!’ Then Jamie would peer with her strained, red-rimmed eyes and would grumble: ‘Oh, leave me in peace, do, lassie!’ But when Barbara laughed, as she must do quite often at the outrageous habits of the great loose-limbed creature, why then these days she would usually cough, and when Barbara started to cough she coughed badly. They had seen a doctor who had spoken about lungs and had shaken his head; not strong, he had told them. But neither of them had quite understood, for their French had remained very embryonic, and they could not afford the smart English doctor. All the same when Barbara coughed Jamie sweated, and her fear would produce an acute irritation. ‘Here, drink this water! Don’t sit there doing nothing but rack yourself to bits, it gets on my nerves. Go and order another bottle of that mixture. God, how can I work if you will go on coughing!’ She would slouch to the piano and play mighty chords, pressing down the loud pedal to drown that coughing.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Yet behind the bar was a small, stuffy sanctum in which this strange man catalogued his collection. The walls of the sanctum were thickly hung with signed photographs, and a good few sketches. At the back of each frame was a neat little number corresponding to that in a locked leather notebook—it had long been his custom to write up his notes before going home with the milk in the morning. People saw their own faces but not their numbers—no client suspected that locked leather notebook. To this room would come Monsieur Pujol’s old cronies for a bock or a petit verre before business; and sometimes, like many another collector, Monsieur Pujol would permit himself to grow prosy. His friends knew most of the pictures by heart; knew their histories too, almost as well as he did; but in spite of this fact he would weary his guests by repeating many a threadbare story. ‘A fine lot, n’est-ce pas?’ he would say with a grin, ‘See that man? Ah, yes—a really great poet. He drank himself to death. In those days it was absinthe—they liked it because it gave them such courage. That one would come here like a scared white rat, but Crénom! when he left he would bellow like a bull—the absinthe, of course—it gave them great courage.’ Or: ‘That woman over there, what a curious head! I remember her very well, she was German. Else Weining, her name was—before the war she would come with a girl she’d picked up here in Paris, just a common whore, a most curious business. They were deeply in love. They would sit at a table in the corner—I can show you their actual table. They never talked much and they drank very little; as far as the drink went those two were bad clients, but so interesting that I did not much mind—I grew almost attached to Else Weining. Sometimes she would come all alone, come early. “Pu,” she would say in her hideous French; “Pu, she must never go back to that hell.” Hell! Sacrénom—she to call it hell! Amazing they are, I tell you, these people. Well, the girl went back, naturally she went back, and Else drowned herself in the Seine. Amazing they are—ces invertis, I tell you! ’ But not all the histories were so tragic as this one; Monsieur Pujol found some of them quite amusing. Quarrels galore he was able to relate, and light infidelities by the dozen. He would mimic a manner of speech, a gesture, a walk—he was really quite a good mimic—and when he did this his friends were not bored; they would sit there and split their sides with amusement.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But most skilfully of all did he recreate for her the image of the luckless queen who came after; as though for some reason this unhappy woman must appeal in a personal way to Stephen. And true it was that the small, humble rooms which the queen had chosen out of all that vast palace, moved Stephen profoundly—so desolate they seemed, so full of unhappy thoughts and emotions that were even now only half forgotten. Brockett pointed to the simple garniture on the mantelpiece of the little salon, then he looked at Stephen: ‘Madame de Lamballe gave those to the queen,’ he murmured softly. She nodded, only vaguely apprehending his meaning. Presently they followed him out into the gardens and stood looking across the Tapis Vert that stretches its quarter mile of greenness towards a straight, lovely line of water. Brockett said, very low, so that Puddle should not hear him: ‘Those two would often come here at sunset. Sometimes they were rowed along the canal in the sunset—can’t you imagine it, Stephen? They must often have felt pretty miserable, poor souls; sick to death of the subterfuge and pretences. Don’t you ever get tired of that sort of thing? My God, I do!’ But she did not answer, for now there was no mistaking his meaning. Last of all he took them to the Temple d’Amour, where it rests amid the great silence of the years that have long lain upon the dead hearts of its lovers; and from there to the Hameau, built by the queen for a whim—the tactless and foolish whim of a tactless and foolish but loving woman—by the queen who must play at being a peasant, at a time when her downtrodden peasants were starving. The cottages were badly in need of repair; a melancholy spot it looked, this Hameau, in spite of the birds that sang in its trees and the golden glint of the afternoon sunshine. On the drive back to Paris they were all very silent. Puddle was feeling too tired to talk, and Stephen was oppressed by a sense of sadness—the vast and rather beautiful sadness that may come to us when we have looked upon beauty, the sadness that aches in the heart of Versailles. Brockett was content to sit opposite Stephen on the hard little let-down seat of her motor. He might have been comfortable next to the driver, but instead he preferred to sit opposite Stephen, and he too was silent, surreptitiously watching the expression of her face in the gathering twilight. When he left them he said with his cold little smile: ‘To-morrow, before you’ve forgotten Versailles, I want you to come to the Conciergerie. It’s very enlightening—cause and effect.’ At that moment Stephen disliked him intensely.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  98 Seldom do both considerations go into discussions of animal consciousness. Signs of cognition and intelligent behavior are often simply interpreted as evidence that animals are conscious and have feelings similar to our own. For example, in the introduction to The Inner World of Farm Animals 99 by Amy Hatkoff, the esteemed primatologist Jane Goodall writes: “Farm animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear, and pain. They are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined . . . they are individuals in their own right.” 100 And in a 2013 interview, Goodall said she had seen many examples of compassion, altruism, calculation, communication, and even some form of conscious thought; she concluded that animals “show emotions similar to those we describe in ourselves.” 101 She speaks with authority when she generalizes from behavior to conscious thought and feelings, but how does she really know what animals experience? Animals certainly act in ways that show they can solve complex problems inside their heads (they behave intelligently), and it goes without saying that each animal is, as Goodall noted, an individual. But scientific practice, at least in my view, cautions us, in the absence of rigorous and compelling evidence, to avoid the attribution of conscious feelings to animals on the basis of our intuition, no matter how strong, that animals should have such feelings. 102 It also goes without saying that the lack of compelling scientific evidence that animals have the kinds of states that we experience as fear, love, joy, sadness, and so forth does not in any way justify their callous or abusive treatment, whether for research, recreational, cosmetic, or nutritional purposes. The treatment of animals in research and in society at large is today held to a high standard by the laws of the United States and many other countries. The assumption underlying these laws, that animals do have feelings, is based on a particular ethical position adopted by our society rather than on scientific data. So long as philosophers, scientists, and the public recognize the difference (that different considerations underlie ethical and scientific conclusions), the integrity of both societal values and science can be preserved. 103 Whether animals are conscious ultimately depends on how consciousness is defined. I will discuss this in more detail in later chapters, but animals are obviously conscious in the sense that, when awake, they are alert and behaviorally responsive to meaningful stimuli. The key issue is whether they are conscious in a mental state way. One problem is that in animals it is very difficult to distinguish a behavioral response controlled by a nonconscious cognitive (mental) process from one that depends upon conscious awareness.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The grave, comely house would not know her any more, nor the garden where she had heard the cuckoo with the dawning understanding of a child, nor the lakes where she had kissed Angela Crossby for the first time—full on the lips as a lover. The good, sweet-smelling meadows with their placid cattle, she was going to leave them; and the hills that protected poor, unhappy lovers—the merciful hills; and the lanes with their sleepy dog-roses at evening; and the little, old township of Upton-on-Severn with its battle-scarred church and its yellowish river; that was where she had first seen Angela Crossby. . . . The spring would come sweeping across Castle Morton, bringing strong, clean winds to the open common. The spring would come sweeping across the whole valley, from the Cotswold Hills right up to the Malverns; bringing daffodils by their hundreds and thousands, bringing bluebells to the beech wood down by the lakes, bringing cygnets for Peter the swan to protect; bringing sunshine to warm the old bricks of the house—but she would not be there any more in the spring. In summer the roses would not be her roses, nor the luminous carpet of leaves in the autumn, nor the beautiful winter forms of the beech trees: ‘And on evenings in winter these lakes are quite frozen, and the ice looks like slabs of gold in the sunset, when you and I come and stand here in the winter. . . .’ No, no, not that memory, it was too much—‘when you and I come and stand here in the winter. . . .’ Getting up, she wandered about the room, touching its kind and familiar objects; stroking the desk, examining a pen, grown rusty from long disuse as it lay there; then she opened a little drawer in the desk and took out the key of her father’s locked bookcase. Her mother had told her to take what she pleased—she would take one or two of her father’s books. She had never examined this special bookcase, and she could not have told why she suddenly did so. As she slipped the key into the lock and turned it, the action seemed curiously automatic. She began to take out the volumes slowly and with listless fingers, scarcely glancing at their titles. It gave her something to do, that was all—she thought that she was trying to distract her attention.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  TENTH STORYThe wife of a physician, mistakenly assuming her lover, who has taken an opiate, to be dead, deposits him in a trunk, which is carried off to their house by two money-lenders with the man still inside it. On coming to his senses, he is seized as a thief, but the lady’s maidservant tells the judge that it was she who put him in the trunk, thereby saving him from the gallows, whilst the usurers are sentenced to pay a fine for making off with the trunk. Now that the king had finished, only Dioneo was left to address the company. Knowing this to be so, and having already been asked by the king to proceed, he began as follows: These sorrowful accounts of ill-starred loves have brought so much affliction to my eyes and heart (to say nothing of yours, dear ladies) that I have been longing for them to come to an end. Unless I were to add another sorry tale to this gruesome collection (and Heaven forbid that I should), they are now, thank God, over and done with. And instead of lingering any longer on so agonizing a topic, I shall make a start on a better and rather more agreeable theme, which will possibly offer some sort of guide to the subject we ought to discuss on the morrow. Fairest maidens, I will have you know that in the comparatively recent past there lived in Salerno a very great surgeon called Doctor Mazzeo della Montagna,1 who, having reached a ripe old age, married a beautiful and gently bred young lady of that same city. No other woman in Salerno was kept so lavishly supplied as Mazzeo’s wife with expensive and elegant dresses, jewellery, and all the other things a woman covets; but the fact is that for most of the time she felt chilly, because the surgeon failed to keep her properly covered over in bed. Now, you may remember my telling you about Messer Ricciardo di Chinzica, and of the way he taught his wife to observe the feasts of the various Saints. This old surgeon did much the same thing, for he pointed out to the girl that you needed heaven knows how many days to recover after making love to a woman, and spouted a lot of similar nonsense, all of which made her wretchedly unhappy. But as she was a woman of considerable spirit and intelligence, she resolved to put the family jewels in cotton wool and wear out some other man’s gems. Having gone out into the streets, she cast a critical eye over a number of young bloods, eventually finding one who was exactly to her liking, and she made him the sole custodian of her hopes, heart, and happiness. On perceiving her interest in him, the young man was powerfully smitten, and wholeheartedly reciprocated her love.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Like Gelasius, Gregory had been secretary to his predecessor. He was a man of undoubted spiritual strength, but his essential talent and interest lay in administration. Like Gelasius he was hard. A successful pope had to be in that period; indeed, Gregory’s successor, Sabinian, was hated for refusing to hand out free grain from the papal stores – the mob hooted and pelted his funeral procession. No contemporary wrote a pious life of Gregory. There is nothing about him in the series of biographical annals of the Popes kept at the time. Instead we have a ninth-century account compiled by John the Deacon, who used older sources and traditions. From near-contemporary frescoes, later destroyed, he discovered that Gregory was of medium height, with a large bald head, light-brown eyes, and long, thin, arched eyebrows; he had an aquiline nose, red thick lips, a swarthy complexion, often flushed in later life. Rather like St Paul, he lacked personal dignity or impressiveness, and he called himself ‘an ape forced to play the lion’. He also lamented his poor health, his weak digestion, his gout and his bouts of malaria, which he dosed with retsina wine from Alexandria. Like many frail clerics, however, he had a strong will, and much practical common sense. He might have been born to rule in the Dark Ages, when the Church could not afford frills and had to concentrate on essentials. He surrounded himself with hard-working monks. The future, he thought, lay with the ‘emerging nations’ north of the Alps. The job of the Bishop of Rome was to bring them into Christianity, to integrate them with the ecclesiastical system. It was no use lamenting the empire. ‘The eagle’, he wrote, ‘has gone bald and lost his feathers.... Where is the senate, where are the old people of Rome? Gone.’ It was no use speculating on doctrinal niceties. As one of his immediate successors put it, the debate over Christ’s ‘will’ – the fashionable Constantinople topic of the moment – was for grammarians, not active churchmen; philosophy was for ‘croaking frogs’. Gregory preached a basic evangelical religion, shorn of classical complexity and elegance; and he sent his monks to teach it to wild, coarse Germanic-speaking warriors with long hair and the future in their strong arms. Meanwhile he himself concentrated on creating a papal patrimony for the ecclesiastical administration of Italy. He developed and expanded the systematic charity which had always been a feature of the Christian Church. But he also raised funds to repair the aqueducts. We find him employing his considerable energies on such matters as horse-breeding, the slaughter of cattle, the administration of legacies, the accuracy of accounts, the level of rents and the price of leases. He took a direct

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  A mysterious and wonderful thing this oneness, pregnant with comfort could she know its true meaning—she felt this somewhere deep down in herself, but try as she would her mind could not grasp it; perhaps even the garden was shutting her out of its prayers, because she had sent away Martin. Then a thrush began to sing in the cedar, and his song was full of wild jubilation: ‘Stephen, look at me, look at me!’ sang the thrush, ‘I’m happy, happy, it’s all very simple!’ There was something heartless about that singing which only served to remind her of Martin. She walked on disconsolate, thinking deeply. He had gone, he would soon be back in his forests—she had made no effort to keep him beside her because he had wanted to be her lover. . . . ‘Stephen, look at us, look at us!’ sang the birds, ‘We’re happy, happy, it’s all very simple!’ Martin walking in dim, green places—she could picture his life away in the forests, a man’s life, good with the goodness of danger, a primitive, strong, imperative thing—a man’s life, the life that should have been hers—And her eyes filled with heavy, regretful tears, yet she did not quite know for what she was weeping. She only knew that some great sense of loss, some great sense of incompleteness possessed her, and she let the tears trickle down her face, wiping them off one by one with her finger. And now she was passing the old potting shed where Collins had lain in the arms of the footman. Choking back her tears she paused by the shed, and tried to remember the girl’s appearance. Grey eyes—no, blue, and a round-about figure—plump hands, with soft skin always puckered from soap-suds—a housemaid’s knee that had pained very badly: ‘See that dent? That’s the water. . . . It fair makes me sick.’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Though his poverty was acute, the extent to which he had squandered his wealth had not yet been fully borne home to Federigo; but on this particular morning, finding that he had nothing to set before the lady for whose love he had entertained so lavishly in the past, his eyes were well and truly opened to the fact. Distressed beyond all measure, he silently cursed his bad luck and rushed all over the house like one possessed, but could find no trace of either money or valuables. By now the morning was well advanced, he was still determined to entertain the gentlewoman to some sort of meal, and, not wishing to beg assistance from his own farmer (or from anyone else, for that matter), his gaze alighted on his precious falcon, which was sitting on its perch in the little room where it was kept. And having discovered, on picking it up, that it was nice and plump, he decided that since he had nowhere else to turn, it would make a worthy dish for such a lady as this. So without thinking twice about it he wrung the bird’s neck and promptly handed it over to his housekeeper to be plucked, dressed, and roasted carefully on a spit. Then he covered the table with spotless linen, of which he still had a certain amount in his possession, and returned in high spirits to the garden, where he announced to his lady that the meal, such as he had been able to prepare, was now ready. The lady and her companion rose from where they were sitting and made their way to the table. And together with Federigo, who waited on them with the utmost deference, they made a meal of the prize falcon without knowing what they were eating. On leaving the table they engaged their host in pleasant conversation for a while, and when the lady thought it time to broach the subject she had gone there to discuss, she turned to Federigo and addressed him affably as follows: ‘I do not doubt for a moment, Federigo, that you will be astonished at my impertinence when you discover my principal reason for coming here, especially when you recall your former mode of living and my virtue, which you possibly mistook for harshness and cruelty. But if you had ever had any children to make you appreciate the power of parental love, I should think it certain that you would to some extent forgive me.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘Yes,’ said Williams dourly, as though she had spoken, ‘I’m reduced to readin’ about ’eavenly ’orses. A nice endin’ that for a man like me, what’s been in the service of Sir Philip Gordon, what’s ’ad ’is legs across the best ’unters as ever was seen in this county or any! And I don’t believe in them lion-headed beasts breathin’ fire and brimstone, it’s all agin nature. Whoever it was wrote them Revelations, can’t never have been inside of a stable. I don’t believe in no ’eavenly ’orses neither—there won’t be no ’orses in ’eaven; and a good thing too, judgin’ by the description.’ ‘I’m surprised at you, Arth-thur, bein’ so disrespectful to The Book!’ his wife reproached him gravely. ‘Well, it ain’t no encyclopaedee to the stable, and that’s a sure thing,’ grinned Williams. Stephen looked from one to the other. They were old, very old, fast approaching completion. Quite soon their circle would be complete, and then Williams would be able to tackle Saint John on the points of those heavenly horses. Mrs. Williams glanced apologetically at her: ‘Excuse ’im, Miss Stephen, ’e’s gettin’ rather childish. ’E won’t read no pretty parts of The Book; all ’e’ll read is them parts about chariots and such like. All what’s to do with ’orses ’e reads; and then ’e’s so unbelievin’—it’s aw-ful!’ But she looked at her mate with the eyes of a mother, very gentle and tolerant eyes. And Stephen, seeing those two together, could picture them as they must once have been, in the halcyon days of their youthful vigour. For she thought that she glimpsed through the dust of the years, a faint flicker of the girl who had lingered in the lanes when the young man Williams and she had been courting. And looking at Williams as he stood before her twitching and bowed, she thought that she glimpsed a faint flicker of the youth, very stalwart and comely, who had bent his head downwards and sideways as he walked and whispered and kissed in the lanes. And because they were old yet undivided, her heart ached; not for them but rather for Stephen. Her youth seemed as dross when compared to their honourable age; because they were undivided. She said: ‘Make him sit down, I don’t want him to stand.’ And she got up and pushed her own chair towards him. But old Mrs. Williams shook her white head slowly: ‘No, Miss Stephen, ’e wouldn’t sit down in your presence. Beggin’ your pardon, it would ’urt Arth-thur’s feelin’s to be made to sit down; it would make ’im feel as ’is days of service was really over.’ ‘I don’t need to sit down,’ declared Williams.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He had also some literary talent, and wrote or dictated an autobiography in the simple, objective style of Caesar, ending with the defeat of the Protestant league (1548); but it is dry and cold, destitute of great ideas and noble sentiments. He married his cousin, Donna Isabella of Portugal, at Seville, 1526, and lived in happy union with her till her sudden death in 1539; but during his frequent absences from Spain, where she always remained, as well as before his marriage, and after her death, he indulged in ephemeral unlawful attachments.310 He had at least two illegitimate children, the famous Margaret, Duchess of Parma, and Don Juan of Austria, the hero of Lepanto (1547–1578), who lies buried by his side in the Escorial. Charles has often been painted by the master hand of Titian, whom he greatly admired. He was of middle size, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, with a commanding forehead, an aquiline nose, a pale, grave, and melancholy countenance. His blue and piercing eye, his blonde, almost reddish hair, and fair skin, betokened his German origin, and his projecting lower jaw, with its thick, heavy lip, was characteristic of the princes of Habsburg; but otherwise he looked like a Spaniard, as he was at heart. Incessant labors and cares, gluttony, and consequent gout, undermined his constitution, and at the age of fifty he was prematurely old, and had to be carried on a litter like a helpless cripple. Notwithstanding his many victories and successes, he was in his later years an unhappy and disappointed man, but sought and found his last comfort in the religion of his fathers. § 51. The Ecclesiastical Policy of Charles V. The ecclesiastical policy of Charles was Roman Catholic without being ultramontane. He kept his coronation oath. All his antecedents were in favor of the traditional faith. He was surrounded by ecclesiastics and monks. He was thoroughly imbued with the Spanish type of piety, of which his grandmother is the noblest and purest representative. Isabella the Catholic, the greatest of Spanish sovereigns, "the queen of earthly queens."311 conquered the Moors, patronized the discoverer of America, expelled the Jews, and established the Inquisition,—all for the glory of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic religion.312 A genuine Spaniard believes, with Gonzalo of Oviedo, that "powder against the infidels is incense to the Lord." With him, as with his Moorish antipode, the measure of conviction is the measure of intolerance, and persecution the evidence of zeal. The burning of heretics became in the land of the Inquisition a sacred festival, an "act of faith;"313 and such horrid spectacles were in the reign of Philip II. as popular as the bull-fights which still flourish in Spain, and administer to the savage taste for blood.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Lambert himself, in his letters, complained of the prevailing corruptions and the abuse of evangelical liberty.784 A good reason both for the necessity and difficulty of discipline, which should have begun with the prince. But self-government must be acquired by actual trial and experience. Nobody can learn to swim without going into the water. The Landgrave put himself at the head of the church, and reformed it after the Saxon model. He abolished the mass and the canon law, confiscated the property of the convents, endowed hospitals and schools, arranged church visitations, and appointed six superintendents (1531). The combination of Lutheran and Reformed elements in the Hessian reformation explains the confessional complication and confusion in the subsequent history, and the present status of the Protestant Church in Hesse, which is claimed by both denominations.785 The best service which the Landgrave did to the cause of learning and religion, was the founding of the University of Marburg, which was opened July 1, 1527, with a hundred and four students. It became the second nursery of the Protestant ministry, next to Wittenberg, and remains to this day an important institution. Francis Lambert, Adam Kraft, Erhard Schnepf, and Hermann Busch were its first theological professors. Lambert now had, after a roaming life of great poverty, a settled situation with a decent support. He lectured on his favorite books, the Canticles, the Prophets, and the Apocalypse; but he had few hearers, was not popular with his German colleagues, and felt unhappy. He attended the eucharistic Colloquy at Marburg in October, 1529, as a spectator, became a convert to the view of Zwingli, and defended it in his last work.786 This must have made his position more uncomfortable. He wished to find "some little town in Switzerland where he could teach the people what he had received from the Lord."787 But before this wish could be fulfilled, he died with his wife and daughter, of the pestilence, April 18, 1530. He was an original, but eccentric and erratic genius, with an over-sanguine temperament, with more zeal and eloquence than wisdom and discretion. His chief importance lies in the advocacy of the principle of ecclesiastical self-government and discipline. His writings are thoughtful; and the style is clear, precise, vivacious, and direct, as may be expected from a Frenchman.788 Lambert seems to have had a remote influence on Scotland, where principles of church government somewhat similar to his own were carried into practice after the model of the Reformed Church of Geneva. For among his pupils was Patrick Hamilton, the proto-martyr of the Scotch Reformation, who was burned at St. Andrews, Feb. 29, 1528.789 According to the usual view, William Tyndale also, the pioneer of the English Bible Version, studied at Marburg about the same time; for several of his tracts contain on the titlepage or in the colophon the imprint, Hans Luft at Marborow (Marburg) in the land of Hesse."790 § 99. The Reformation in Prussia. Duke Albrecht and Bishop Georg Von Polenz. I.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  For perhaps it would have served him right if he had chanced upon a wife, who, being driven from the house in her shift, had found some other man to shake her skin-coat for her, earning herself a fine new dress in the process. * * * Dioneo’s story had ended, and the ladies, some taking one side and some another, some finding fault with one of its details and some commending another, had talked about it at length, when the king, having raised his eyes to observe that the sun had already sunk low in the evening sky, began, without getting up, to address them as follows: ‘Graceful ladies, the wisdom of mortals consists, as I think you know, not only in remembering the past and apprehending the present, but in being able, through a knowledge of each, to anticipate the future, 1 which grave men regard as the acme of human intelligence. ‘Tomorrow, as you know, a fortnight will have elapsed since the day we departed from Florence to provide for our relaxation, preserve our health and our lives, and escape from the sadness, the suffering and the anguish continuously to be found in our city since this plague first descended upon it. These aims we have achieved, in my judgement, without any loss of decorum. For as far as I have been able to observe, albeit the tales related here have been

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Like them, I too intend to command that a song should be sung, and since I am sure that your songs will be no less gloomy than your stories, I desire that you should choose one and sing it to us now, so that no day other than this will be blighted by your woes.’ Filostrato replied that he would be only too willing to obey, and launched immediately into a song, the words of which ran as follows: ‘With fitting tears, I show The mourning heart bereaved, Its faith in Love deceived. ‘Love, who first fixed into my heart She for whom now I sigh in vain, You showed me her so full of grace That I held light each bitter pain Which came to torment me So everlastingly. I know my error now; Not without grief, I vow. ‘I comprehend that false deceit And see how, while I thought that she Seemed to allow my love, she’d found Another servant, spurning me. Ah, then I could not see My future misery! But she the other took And me for him forsook. ‘A mournful song swelled through my heart When I perceived that I was spurned, That dwells there still; and oft I curse Faith, hope, love and the hour I learned Her noble beauteousness Whose radiance doth oppress My dying soul, which yet Cannot those charms forget.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Even if Paganino leaves me (and he seems to have no such intention, provided I want to stay), I would never come back to you in any case, because if you were to be squeezed from head to toe there wouldn’t be a thimbleful of sauce to show for it. Life with you was all loss and no gain as far as I was concerned, so if there were to be a next time, I would be trying my luck elsewhere. Once and for all, then, I repeat that I intend to stay here, where there are no holy days and no vigils. And if you don’t clear off quickly I shall scream for help and claim you were trying to molest me.’ On seeing that the situation was hopeless, and realizing for the first time how foolish he had been to take a young wife when he was so impotent, Messer Ricciardo walked out of the room, feeling all sad and forlorn, and although he had a long talk with Paganino, it made no difference whatever. And so finally, having achieved precisely nothing, he left the lady there and returned to Pisa, where his grief threw him into such a state of lunacy that whenever people met him in the street and put any question to him, the only answer they got was: ‘There’s never any rest for the bar.’ 8 Shortly afterwards he died, and when the news reached Paganino, knowing how deeply the lady loved him, he made her his legitimate wife. And without paying any heed to holy days or vigils or observing Lent, they worked their fingers to the bone and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. So it seems to me, dear ladies, that our friend Bernabò, by taking the course he pursued with Ambrogiuolo, was riding on the edge of a precipice. * * * This story threw the whole company into such fits of laughter that there was none of them whose jaws were not aching, and the ladies unanimously agreed that Dioneo was right and that Bernabò had been an ass. But now that the tale was ended, the queen waited for the laughter to subside, and then, seeing that it was late and everyone had told a story, and realizing that her reign had come to an end, she removed the garland from her own head in the usual way, and, placing it on Neifile’s, she said to her with a laugh: ‘Dear sister, I do hereby pronounce you sovereign of our tiny nation.’ And then she returned to her place. Neifile blushed a little on receiving this honour, so that her face was like the rose that blooms at dawn in early summer, whilst her eyes, which she had lowered slightly, glittered and shone like the morning star.