Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida | Page 4

the west, till the pale green of evening spreads itself above them, and the stars arise; and then, with a prayer--be your faith what it will--a prayer to the Unknown God, to go down again through the violet-scented air and the dreamful twilight, and so, with unspeakable thankfulness, simply because you live, and this is Rome--so homeward.
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The strong instinctive veracity in her weighed the measure of her days, and gave them their right name. She was content, her life was full of the sweetness and strength of the arts, and of the peace of noble occupation and endeavour. But some true instinct in her taught her that this is peace, but is not more than peace. Happiness comes but from the beating of one heart upon another.
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There was a high wall near, covered with peach-trees, and topped with wistaria and valerian, and the handsome wild caperplant; and against the wall stood rows of tall golden sunflowers late in their blooming; the sun they seldom could see for the wall, and it was pathetic always to me, as the day wore on, to watch the poor stately amber heads turn straining to greet their god, and only meeting the stones and the cobwebs, and the peach-leaves of their inexorable barrier.
They were so like us!--straining after the light, and only finding bricks and gossamer and wasps'-nests! But the sunflowers never made mistakes as we do: they never took the broken edge of a glass bottle or the glimmer of a stable lanthorn for the glory of Helios, and comforted themselves with it--as we can do.
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Dear, where we love much we always forgive, because we ourselves are nothing, and what we love is all.
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There is something in the silence of an empty room that sometimes has a terrible eloquence: it is like the look of coming death in the eyes of a dumb animal; it beggars words and makes them needless.
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When you have said to yourself that you will kill any one, the world only seems to hold yourself and him, and God--who will see the justice done.
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What is it that love does to a woman?--without it she only sleeps; with it, alone, she lives.
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A great love is an absolute isolation, and an absolute absorption. Nothing lives or moves or breathes, save one life: for one life alone the sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and the stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem but ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all eternity can be but its heritage alone.
* * *
Is Nature kind or cruel? Who can tell?
The cyclone comes, or the earthquake; the great wave rises and swallows the cities and the villages, and goes back whence it came; the earth yawns, and devours the pretty towns and the sleeping children, the gardens where the lovers were sitting, and the churches where women prayed, and then the morass dries up and the gulf unites again. Men build afresh, and the grass grows, and the trees, and all the flowering seasons come back as of old. But the dead are dead: nothing changes that!
As it is with the earth, so it is with our life; our own poor, short, little life, that is all we can really call our own.
Calamities shatter, and despair engulfs it; and yet after a time the chasm seems to close; the storm wave seems to roll back; the leaves and the grass return; and we make new dwellings. That is, the daily ways of living are resumed, and the common tricks of our speech and act are as they used to be before disaster came upon us. Then wise people say, he or she has "got over it." Alas, alas! the drowned children will not come back to us; the love that was struck down, the prayer that was silenced, the altar that was ruined, the garden that was ravished, they are all gone for ever,--for ever, for ever! Yet we live; because grief does not always kill, and often does not speak.
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I crept through the myrtles downward, away from the house where the statue lay shattered. The earliest of the nightingales of the year was beginning her lay in some leafy covert hard by, but never would he hear music in their piping again; never, never: any more than I should hear the song of the Faun in the fountain.
For the song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in our hearts.
And his heart, I knew, would be for ever empty and silent, like a temple