Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life |
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answer autumn beautiful bicycle charm church coloured consolation course courtship creatures Cupid and Psyche dear Madame Blanc death delicate delightful diamonds Don Giovanni dreadful enjoy epicurean experience eyes fact fancy feel felt Fiesole flowers friendship Gabrielle Delzant Garmisch ghosts gifts give grace grass HANGING GARDENS happen happy heart heaven human imagination Ingres Ingres Museum Jansenist kind lady Leibnitzian letters life's literature living look Magic Flute marriage Mary Lamb mean merely methinks mind Montauban moral Mozart mysterious nature never occasionally one's ourselves Pangloss Past perhaps persons pistachio play pleasant pleasure poetry poor possession present reality remember round seems Semiramis sense serene silent sometimes soul speak spirit stage jewel superfine sure sweet talking taste things thought tion Titian train turn VERNON LEE Verona voice wonderful words young youth
Popular passages
Page 227 - Das strenge Herz, es fühlt sich mild und weich; Was ich besitze, seh ich wie im Weiten, Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten.
Page 245 - Eh bien, défendez-vous au sage De se donner des soins pour le plaisir d'autrui ? Cela même est un fruit que je goûte aujourd'hui : J'en puis jouir demain, et quelques jours encore ; Je puis enfin compter l'aurore Plus d'une fois sur vos tombeaux.
Page 18 - ... enactment and experience of 'foreignness', and the prominence of 'the foreign' in their writing, signify their positionality as female intellectuals in the business of defining culture, who speak, as foreigners, from difference, and make a virtue of their estrangement: Lee maintains 'that we all of us are the better, of whatever nationality (and most, perhaps, we rather too-too solid Anglo-Saxons) for some fusion of a foreign element'.24 Their work on the arts of the eighteenth century in Italy...
Page 231 - TpHE clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watch did not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it while rambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is that when I got there, at the gallop of my cab-horse, the express was gone.
Page 69 - A new friendship, by this unconscious imitation of the new friend's nature and habits, and by the excitement of the thing's pleasant novelty, causes us to discover new qualities in literature, art, our surroundings, ourselves. How different does the scenery look — still familiar but delightfully strange — as we drive along the valleys or scramble in the hills with the new friend ! < there is a distant peak one never noticed, or a scented herb which has always...
Page 87 - I have spoken of reveals the fact that we usually have far too many pleasant things about us, to be able to extract much pleasure from any of them ; while, of course, somebody else, at the other end of the world let us say, or merely in the mews to the back, has so very much too little as to have none at all, which is another way of diminishing possible enjoyment.
Page 235 - Evil comes from the gods, no doubt ; but so do all things ; and to extract good from it — the great Prometheus-feat of man — is not to evil's credit, but to the credit of good. The contrary doctrine is a poison to the spirit, though a poison of medicinal use in moments of anguish, a bromide or an opiate.
Page 151 - The words are Madame de Hauterive's, one of the most charming among eighteenth-century letter-writers ; but one of whom, for all the indiscretion of that age, we know little or nothing : a delicate, austere outline merely, a reserved and sensitive ghost shrinking into the dimness.
Page 107 - And one of the unnoticed, because continuous, tragedies of existence is surely such wanton or deliberate destruction of the individual qualities of the soul, such sacrifice of the necessary breathing and standing place which even the smallest requires ; such grudging of the needful solitude and separateness, alas ! often to those that we love the best.