Book

Novel [Science-Fiction]

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth

century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by

intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as

men busied themselves about their various concerns they were

scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a

microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and

multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and

fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their

assurance of their empire over matter…”

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"VALENTINE. Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus:

    Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.

    Were't not affection chains thy tender days

    To the sweet glances of thy honour'd love,

    I rather would entreat thy company

    To see the wonders of the world abroad,

    Than, living dully sluggardiz'd at home,

    Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.

    But since thou lov'st, love still, and thrive therein,

    Even as I would, when I to love begin.

  PROTEUS. Wilt thou be gone? Sweet Valentine, adieu!

    Think on thy Proteus, when thou haply seest

    Some rare noteworthy object in thy travel..."

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"SERAP. Portents and prodigies have grown so frequent,

      That they have lost their name. Our fruitful Nile

      Flowed ere the wonted season, with a torrent

      So unexpected, and so wondrous fierce,

      That the wild deluge overtook the haste

      Even of the hinds that watched it: Men and beasts

      Were borne above the tops of trees, that grew

      On the utmost margin of the water-mark.

      Then, with so swift an ebb that flood drove backward,

      It slipt from underneath the scaly herd:

      Here monstrous phocae: panted on the shore;

      Forsaken dolphins there with their broad tails,

      Lay lashing the departing waves: hard by them,

      Sea horses floundering in the slimy mud,

      Tossed up their heads, and dashed the ooze about them..."

-

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"YE who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have

long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed

strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many

centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And,

when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and

yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here

graven with a stylus of iron..."

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"THE CHATEAU into which my valet had ventured to make forcible

entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded

condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles

of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among

the Appennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs.

Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately

abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least

sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the

building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique…”

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" 'You've spoiled everything, Ned,' she said. 'It's all so beautiful

and natural until this kind of thing comes in. It is such a pity.

Why can't you control yourself? '

  'I didn't invent it,' I pleaded. 'It's nature. It's love!'

  'Well, perhaps if both love it may be different. I have never felt

it.'

  'But you must- you, with your beauty, with your soul! Oh, Gladys,

you were made for love! You must love!'

  'One must wait till it comes.'

  ‘But why can’t you love me, Gladys? Is it my appearance, or what?..”

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 "I TOOK a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge

old building whose upper stories had been

wholly unoccupied for years, until I came. The

place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs,

to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among

the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that

first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the

first time in my life a superstitious dread came over

me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway

and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof in my

face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had

encountered a phantom..."

Book

 "YOU will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the

commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil

forebodings. I arrived here yesterday; and my first task is to

assure my dear sister of my welfare, and increasing confidence in

the success of my undertaking.

  I am already far north of London; and as I walk in the streets

of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks,

which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand

this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions

towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy

climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become

more fervent and vivid….”

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"DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of

the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had

been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of

country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew

on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it

was- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of

insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the

feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because

poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the

sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible….”

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 " My dear Walkley

  You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity

with which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by

this time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has

arrived: here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per

alium facit per se. * Its profits, like its labor, belong to me:

its morals, its manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young,

are for you to justify. You were of mature age when you made the

suggestion; and you knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since,

as twin pioneers of the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled

in the same new sheets, began an epoch in the criticism of the theatre

and the opera house by making it the pretext for a propaganda of our

own views of life. So you cannot plead ignorance of the character of

the force you set in motion. You meant me to epater le bourgeois..."

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"ALG. Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?

  LANE. I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

  ALG. I'm sorry for that, for your sake. I don't play accurately-

     anyone can play accurately- but I play with wonderful

     expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my

     forte. I keep science for Life.

  LANE. Yes, sir.

  ALG. And, speaking of the science of Life, have you got the

     cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell?

  LANE. Yes, sir. [Hands them on a salver.]

  ALG. [Inspects them, takes two, and sits down on the sofa.] Oh!...

     by the way, Lane, I see from your book that on Thursday night,

     when Lord Shoreman and Mr. Worthing were dining with me, eight

bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed...."

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".... As he did so, a knock

came to the door. He passed out as his servant entered.

  "The persons are here, Monsieur."

  He felt that the man must be got rid of at once. He must not be

allowed to know where the picture was being taken to. There was

something sly about him, and he had thoughtful, treacherous eyes.

Sitting down at the writing-table, he scribbled a note to Lord

Henry, asking him to send him round something to read, and reminding

him that they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening.

  "Wait for an answer," he said, handing it to him, "and show the

men in here...."

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 "What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an

answer. Certainly there be, that delight in giddiness, and count it

a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as

in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be

gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same

veins, though there be not so much blood in them, as was in those of

the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor, which men

take in finding out of truth, nor again, that when it is found, it

imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a

natural though corrupt love, of the lie itself….”