Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida | Page 3

never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome
when one thinks of it.
* * *
I have had some skill in managing the minds of crowds; it is a mere
knack, like any other; it belongs to no particular character or culture.
Arnold of Brescia had it, and so had Masaniello. Lamartine had it, and
so had Jack Cade.
* * *

It is of use to have a reputation for queerness; it gains one many
solitary moments of peace.
* * *
Ersilia was a good soul, and full of kindliness; but charity is a flower
not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise
of profit.
* * *
The soul of the poet is like a mirror of an astrologer: it bears the
reflection of the past and of the future, and can show the secrets of men
and gods; but all the same it is dimmed by the breath of those who
stand by and gaze into it.
* * *
"You are not unhappy now?" I said to her in farewell.
She looked at me with a smile.
"You have given me hope; and I am in Rome, and I am young."
She was right. Rome may be only a ruin, and Hope but another name
for deception and disappointment; but Youth is supreme happiness in
itself, because all possibilities lie in it, and nothing in it is as yet
irrevocable.
* * *
There never was an Æneas; there never was a Numa; well, what the
better are we? We only lose the Trojan ship gliding into Tiber's mouth,
when the woodland thickets that bloomed by Ostia were reddening with
the first warmth of the day's sun; we only lose the Sabine lover going
by the Sacred Way at night, and sweet Egeria weeping in the woods of
Nemi; and are--by their loss--how much the poorer!
Perhaps all these things never were.

The little stone of truth, rolling through the many ages of the world, has
gathered and grown grey with the thick mosses of romance and
superstition. But tradition must always have that little stone of truth as
its kernel; and perhaps he who rejects all, is likelier to be wrong than
even foolish folk like myself who love to believe all, and who tread the
new paths, thinking ever of the ancient stories.
* * *
There can be hardly any life more lovely upon earth than that of a
young student of art in Rome. With the morning, to rise to the sound of
countless bells and of innumerable streams, and see the silver lines of
the snow new fallen on the mountains against the deep rose of the dawn,
and the shadows of the night steal away softly from off the city,
releasing, one by one, dome and spire, and cupola and roof, till all the
wide white wonder of the place discloses itself under the broad
brightness of full day; to go down into the dark cool streets, with the
pigeons fluttering in the fountains, and the sounds of the morning
chants coming from many a church door and convent window, and
little scholars and singing children going by with white clothes on, or
scarlet robes, as though walking forth from the canvas of Botticelli or
Garofalo; to eat frugally, sitting close by some shop of flowers and
birds, and watching all the while the humours and the pageants of the
streets by quaint corners, rich with sculptures of the Renaissance, and
spanned by arches of architects that builded for Agrippa, under grated
windows with arms of Frangipanni or Colonna, and pillars that
Apollodorus raised; to go into the great courts of palaces, murmurous
with the fall of water, and fresh with green leaves and golden fruit, that
rob the colossal statues of their gloom and gauntness, and thence into
the vast chambers where the greatest dreams that men have ever had,
are written on panel and on canvas, and the immensity and the silence
of them all are beautiful and eloquent with dead men's legacies to the
living, where the Hours and the Seasons frolic beside the Maries at the
Sepulchre, and Adonis bares his lovely limbs, in nowise ashamed
because S. Jerome and S. Mark are there; to study and muse, and
wonder and be still, and be full of the peace which passes all
understanding, because the earth is lovely as Adonis is, and life is yet

unspent; to come out of the sacred light, half golden, and half dusky,
and full of many blended colours, where the marbles and the pictures
live, sole dwellers in the deserted dwellings of princes; to come out
where the oranges are all aglow in the sunshine, and the red camellias
are pushing against the hoary head of