Julius Le Vallon: An Episode

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Cassell, Limited, 1916 - 332 pages

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Page 165 - I HAVE been here before, But when or how I cannot tell : I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore. You have been mine before, — How long ago I may not know : But just when at that swallow's soar Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall, — I knew it all of yore.
Page 270 - The power is ours to make or mar Our fate as on the earliest morn, The Darkness and the Radiance are Creatures within the spirit born. Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might Forget how we imagined light. "Not yet are fixed the prison bars; The hidden light the spirit owns If blown to flame would dim the stars And they who rule them from their thrones: And the proud sceptred spirits thence Would bow to pay us reverence.
Page 256 - Now we cannot doubt that a character may remain determined by an event which has been forgotten. I have forgotten the greater number of the good and evil acts which I have done in my present life. And yet each must have left a trace on my character. And so a man may carry over into his next life the dispositions and tendencies which he has gained by the moral contests of this life, and the value of those experiences will not have been destroyed by the death which has destroyed the memory of them.
Page 18 - We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature...
Page 259 - The gain which the memory of the past gives us here is that the memory of past love for any person can strengthen our present love of him. And this is what must be preserved, if the value of past love is not to be lost.
Page 245 - ... in this life. And so a man who dies after acquiring knowledge — and all men acquire some — might enter his new life, deprived indeed of his knowledge, but not deprived of the increased strength and delicacy of mind which he had gained in acquiring the knowledge. And, if so, he will be wiser in the second life because of what has happened in the first. Of course he loses something in losing the actual knowledge.
Page 3 - Without him, the accumulation of mental- and moral experiences, shown as faculties, would be as impossible as would be the accumulation of physical experiences, shown as racial and family characteristics, without the continuity of physical plasm. Souls without a past behind them, springing suddenly into existence, out of nothing, with marked mental and moral peculiarities, are a conception as monstrous as would be the corresponding conception of babies suddenly appearing from nowhere, unrelated to...
Page 149 - Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say So long, and yearned up the cliffs to tell; Thou art what all the winds have uttered not, What the still night suggesteth to the heart. Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth, Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea; Thy face remembered is from other worlds, It has been died for, though I know not when, It has been sung of, though I know not where. It has the strangeness of the luring West, And of sad sea-horizons; beside thee I am aware of other...
Page 30 - ... post-existence has been the Christian religion. It followed from this that a form of the belief which was never supported by that religion was not likely to be considered of any importance. And Christians have almost always rejected those theories which place pre-existence by the side of post-existence, though there seems nothing in pre-existence incompatible with any of the dogmas which are generally accepted as fundamental to Christianity.
Page 308 - I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless: — That only men incredulous of despair, Half taught in anguish, through the midnight air, Beat upward to God's throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach.

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