Before parting with the Poetics we must add that it contains one excellent piece of advice to dramatists, which is, to imagine themselves present at the scenes which they are supposing to happen, and also at the representation of their own play. This, however, is an exception which proves the rule, for Aristotles exclusively theoretic standpoint here, as will sometimes happen, coincides with the truly practical standpoint.
The road was quite deserted, for the people, who live in great fear, do not venture out.He pointed to a couple of soldiers, and they laid hold of me. They took me to a small room, where I was astonished to find two soldiers with revolvers guarding a priest and a peasant. As soon as the door was closed behind me I wished to chat with my fellow-prisoners, for even in prison I was not oblivious of my journalistic duties. But they seemed not at all anxious to have anything to do with me, and I soon understood the reason why. At each question they threw timid glances at the two watch-dogs, and I saw that fear of these made them withhold all information. However, after a good deal of trouble I got to know that the priest was the parish priest, and his companion in misery the burgomaster. They had been taken as hostages, and would suffer punishment for acts the villagers might eventually commit against the German usurpers. I contented myself with this, as I felt104 that in the circumstances further questions might make things awkward for these two men.
ONE:If a civil engineer is wanted to survey railways, construct docks, bridges, buildings, or permanent works of any kind, there are scores of men ready for the place, and qualified to discharge the duties; but if an engineer is wanted to design and construct machinery, such a person is not easy to be found, and if found, there remains that important question of competency; for the work is not like that of constructing permanent works, where several men may and will perform the undertaking very much in the same manner, and perhaps equally well. In the construction of machinery it is different; the success will be directly as the capacity of the engineer, who will have but few precedents, and still fewer principles, to guide him, and generally has to set out by relying mainly upon his special knowledge of the operation and application of such machines as he has to construct.
TWO:During the two centuries that ended with the close of the Peloponnesian war, a single race, weak numerically, and weakened still further by political disunion, simultaneously developed all the highest human faculties to an extent possibly rivalled but certainly not surpassed by the collective efforts of that vastly greater population which now wields the accumulated resources of modern Europe. This race, while maintaining a precarious foothold on the shores of the Mediterranean by repeated prodigies of courage and genius, contributed a new element to civilisation which has been the mainspring of all subsequent progress, but which, as it expanded into wider circles and encountered an increasing resistance from without, unavoidably lost some of the enormous elasticity that characterised its earliest and most concentrated reaction. It was the just boast of the Greek that to Asiatic refinement and Thracian valour he joined a disinterested thirst for knowledge unshared by his neighbours on either side.5 And if a contemporary of Pericles could have foreseen all that would be thought, and said, and done during2 the next twenty-three centuries of this worlds existence, at no period during that long lapse of ages, not even among the kindred Italian race, could he have found a competitor to contest with Hellas the olive crown of a nobler Olympia, the guerdon due to a unique combination of supreme excellence in every variety of intellectual exercise, in strategy, diplomacy, statesmanship; in mathematical science, architecture, plastic art, and poetry; in the severe fidelity of the historian whose paramount object is to relate facts as they have occurred, and the dexterous windings of the advocate whose interest leads him to evade or to disguise them; in the far-reaching meditations of the lonely thinker grappling with the enigmas of his own soul, and the fervid eloquence by which a multitude on whose decision hang great issues is inspired, directed, or controlled. He would not, it is true, have found any single Greek to pit against the athletes of the Renaissance; there were none who displayed that universal genius so characteristic of the greatest Tuscan artists such as Lionardo and Michael Angelo; nor, to take a much narrower range, did a single Greek writer whose compositions have come down to us excel, or even attempt to excel, in poetry and prose alike. But our imaginary prophet might have observed that such versatility better befitted a sophist like Hippias or an adventurer like Critias than an earnest master of the Pheidian type. He might have quoted Pindars sarcasm about highly educated persons who have an infinity of tastes and bring none of them to perfection;6 holding, as Plato did in the next generation, that one man can only do one thing well, he might have added that the heroes of modern art would have done much nobler work had they concentrated their powers on a single task instead of attempting half a dozen and leaving most of them incomplete.The town was on fire, and ruddy smoke hovered over it. Deserted like a wilderness, not a soul moved in the streets. The first street I entered was the Rue de la Station. Large, imposing mansions used to stand here, but the devouring fire consumed even the last traces of former greatness.
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ONE:"I have come to have a chat with you," she said with her most brilliant smile, "on the subject of the Corner House. They tell me you have made an arrest that by a wonderful chance will have an important bearing on the case."
TWO:In Rome, as well as in Greece, rationalism took the form of disbelief in divination. Here at least the Epicurean, the Academician, and, among the Stoics, the disciple of Panaetius, were all agreed. But as the sceptical movement began at a much later period in Rome than in the country where it first originated, so also did the supernaturalist reaction come later, the age of Augustus in the one corresponding very nearly with the age of Alexander in the other. Virgil and Livy are remarkable for their faith in omens; and although the latter complains of the general incredulity with which narratives of such events were received, his statements are to be taken rather as an index of what people thought in the age immediately preceding his own, than as an accurate description of contemporary opinion. Certainly nothing could be farther from the truth than to say that signs and prodigies were disregarded by the Romans under the empire. Even the cool and cautious Tacitus feels himself obliged to relate sundry marvellous incidents which seemed to accompany or to prefigure great historical catastrophes; and the more credulous Suetonius has transcribed an immense number of such incidents from the pages of older chroniclers, besides informing us of the extreme attention paid even to trifling omens by Augustus.341Out of this eternal unchanging divine substance, which he calls aether, are formed the heavenly bodies and the transparent spheres containing them. But there is something beyond it of an even higher and purer nature. Aristotle proves, with great subtlety, from his fundamental assumptions, that the movement of an extended substance cannot be self-caused. He also proves that motion must be absolutely continuous and without a beginning. We have, therefore, no choice but to accept the existence of an unextended, immaterial, eternal, and infinite Power on which the whole cosmos depends.
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ONE:Where was the seaplane? Would it climb above the murk, glide straight through it and down, swerve and glideor dive out and risk leveling off and setting down just beneath the bank so that its rapidly coming folds, and the silent sea would make a safe and comfortable concealment?London, 1875.
TWO:But here he looked at me in a curious manner, scrutinising my face, as if he asked himself: "Is he pulling my leg, or not?" But not a muscle in my face moved, so that the "Captain" nodded approvingly ... and wrote out a pass for me to go to Vis! I was not allowed to go to Lige, for, as he said, he did not yet know himself how matters stood there. The other officers overwhelmed me with questions: how matters stood in The Netherlands, and whether Great Britain had already27 declared war against us? I think that at that question I looked utterly perplexed, for in the same breath they told me all they knew about the danger of war for The Netherlands: Great Britain first sent an ultimatum to The Netherlands, to force her into joining the Allies against Germany, and as she had refused, the British Fleet was now on its way to Flushing. I explained to them in detail that they were utterly wrong, but they believed only a half of what I said.
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TWO:When he passed the village of Veldwezelt he met193 a motor-car ... in which was Captain Spuer. He recognised his victim at once, and also mistook him for the war correspondent of De Tijd. Mr. van Wersch was immediately detained again, and taken to a farm-house in the neighbourhood, where he was threatened with a revolver, and roared at: "You are the correspondent of De Tijd."
FORE:The Countess gave a low, scornful laugh. Balmayne sentimental was amusing. She had the profoundest contempt herself for girls of Hetty's type. It was always a mystery to her what men could see in them.
FORE:"Much will be needed to repair what has been damaged in this unfortunate country.""So this brave lady succeeded in getting the sentence of death withdrawn. But the Germans wanted to torture their wretched prisoners on any or no plea. They were placed near the church wall, kept standing there all night, were told that they would be shot by and by, and threatened by the soldiers with their bayonets.
FORE:He must have walked under a ladder, from the way things have turned out, he said, amusedly.
FORE:
FORE:The seaplane wavered, caught itself in a steadier line. In the pursuing airplane three youthful faces grew intent.
FORE:He saw nothing of the murderous look in the eyes of his companion. Nobody had seen him enter the house, nobody even knew that he was in London. All the servants had gone to bed. Lalage had by her hand an accomplice ready for anything."Don't touch it," he exclaimed, "keep as far from it as possible. There is real danger here if you only knew it. And whatever you do, don't you go near a soul in the house till you have washed your hands with Sanitas or some pungent disinfectant of that kind. You must be very careful about this."
FORE:On the day of my stay at Charleroi, at about seven o'clock in the evening, there was a good deal of bustle round about the station, many trains from Maubeuge arriving. One of these trains was entirely filled by officers of the garrison who had been taken prisoner. Another carried only wounded Germans, lying on light stretchers, on which they were transported through the streets to the hospitals at Charleroi. Many had fearful wounds, and convulsively held their hands on the injured parts, while others lay still, the pallor of death on their face. Maubeuge must have cost the Germans enormous sacrifices, as for many of the wretched wounded no room could be found at Charleroi, and they had to be taken farther by train, to Namur or Brussels."Shouldn't dare to speak thus of the fascinating Lalage," Harcourt, the little man with the eyeglass, drawled. "Should be afraid of a knife in my back, or something horribly Corsican of that kind. Can't tell you any more except I know the police had a warrant for her arrest, and that she's bolted."
TWO:"Oh yes, I am a Netherland journalist."I pitied him from the bottom of my heart, and tried to console him by remarking that it was all a misunderstanding, and that I would see to it that he would soon be released.
TWO:Some soldiers were rather friendly when I revealed myself as a Netherland reporter; they informed me with serious faces that in Germany two million volunteers were drilling; that in each garrison-town the majority of the men were left behind as reserves; that by and by they were going to level Antwerp to the ground, if these Belgians would not keep quiet; that after all Belgium proved a bigger job than they had bargained for; that Amsterdam and Rotterdam had been shelled and Flushing taken by the British; that Germany had now sent a great number of troops into The Netherlands to protect her against Britain, because The Netherlands herself had no army at all; and so on and so on.
Zeller finds several good qualities in Alexanderprecocious statesmanship, zeal for the extension of Hellenic civilisation, long-continued self-restraint under almost irresistible temptation, and through all his subsequent aberrations a nobility, a moral purity, a humanity, and a culture, which raise him above every other great conqueror; and these he attributes, in no small degree, to the fostering care of Aristotle;176 yet, with the exception of moral purity, which was probably an affair of temperament, and has been remarked to an equal extent in other men of the same general character, he was surpassed, in all these respects, by Julius Caesar; while the ruthless vindictiveness, which was his worst passion, exhibited itself at the very beginning of his reign by the destruction of Thebes. A varnish of literary culture he undoubtedly had, and for this Aristotle may be thanked; but any ordinary sophist would probably have effected as much. As to the Hellenising of Western Asia, this, according to Grote, was the work, not of Alexander, but of the Diadochi after him.Leona Lalage looked round her helplessly for the first time in her life. Maitrank stood there grinning like a hideous mask enjoying her confusion. He had come to enjoy this where a more sensitive man would have stayed away. Revenge to him was nothing unless he could feast his eyes upon it."Can you tell me the name of the paper?" he asked.
TWO:
