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1. Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France (152-4)
You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity — as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves a unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.
This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts, wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.
Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small, benefits from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.
2. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (264-65)
The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. The language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.

I cannot, however, be insensible of the present outcry against the triviality and meanness both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge, that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonorable to the Writer's own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences. From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them bas a worthy purpose. Not that I mean to say, that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived; but I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose. If in this opinion I am mistaken, I can have little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections ameliorated.

3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Biographia Literaria (477-78)
[On the imagination, or esemplastic power]
The Imagination, then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association
4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Biographia Literaria (482-83)
My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word, have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the Fancy and Imagination in the early part of this work. What is poetry?--is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet?--that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind.

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis effertur habenis) reveals "itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John Davies observes of the soul--(and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination)--
Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
As we our food into our nature change.

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings.

Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through the senses to our minds.
Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole

5. Charles Lamb, “Old China” (510)
I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any great house, I inquire for the china-closet, and next for the picture gallery. I cannot defend the order of preference, but by saying, that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to; but I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.
I had no repugnance then -- why should I now have? -- to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspectives -- a china tea-cup.
I like to see my old friends -- whom distance cannot diminish -- figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics) yet on terra firma still -- so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, has made to spring up beneath their sandals.
I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if possible, with still more womanish expressions.
Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver -- two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And here the same lady, or another -- for likeness is identity on teacups -- is stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead -- a furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream!
Farther on -- if far or near can he predicated of their world -- see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays.
Here -- a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive -- so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay.
6. William Hazlitt, “On Gusto” (538)
Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object. -- It is not so difficult to explain this term in what relates to expression (of which it may be said to be the highest degree) as in what relates to things without expression, to the natural appearances of objects, as mere colour or form. In one sense, however, there is hardly any object entirely devoid of expression, without some character of power belonging to it, some precise association with pleasure or pain: and it is in giving this truth of character from the truth of feeling, whether in the highest or the lowest degree, but always in the highest degree of which the subject is capable, that gusto consists.

7. Thomas de Quincey, from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (559)
[The Malay]
I remember, about this time, a little incident which I mention, because, trifling as it was, the reader will soon meet it again in my dreams, which it influenced more fearfully than could be imagined. One day a Malay knocked at my door. What business a Malay could have to transact amongst English mountains, I cannot conjecture; but possibly he was on his road to a seaport about forty miles distant.
The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl, born and bred amongst the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort: his turban, therefore, confounded her not a little; and as it turned out that his attainments in English were exactly of the same extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all communication of ideas, if either party had happened to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed learning of her master (and, doubtless, giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of the earth, besides, perhaps, a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to understand that there was a sort of demon below whom she clearly imagined that my art could exorcise from the house. I did not immediately go down, but when I did, the group which presented itself, arranged as it was by accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes exhibited in the ballets in the opera-house, though so ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall with dark wood, that from age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay, his turban and loose trousers of dingy white relieved upon the dark panelling; he had placed himself nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish, though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity contended with the feeling of simple awe which her countenance expressed, as she gazed upon the tiger-cat before her. And a more striking picture there could not be imagined, than the beautiful English face of the girl, and its exquisite fairness, together with her erect and independent attitude, contrasted with the sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany by marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures, and adorations. Half hidden by the ferocious-looking Malay, was a little child from a neighbouring cottage, who had crept in after him, and was now in the act of reverting its head and gazing upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand he caught at the dress of the young woman for protection.

8. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (172)

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonimous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.
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Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex; and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone.

9. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (187-88)
If, I say, for I would not impress by declamation when Reason offers her sober light, if they be really capable of acting like rational creatures, let them not be treated like slaves; or, like the brutes who are dependent on the reason of man, when they associate with him; but cultivate their minds, give them the salutary, sublime curb of principle, and let them attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves only dependent on God. Teach them, in common with man, to submit to necessity instead of giving, to render them more pleasing, a sex to morals. Further, should experience prove that they cannot attain the same degree of strength of mind, perseverance, and fortitude, let their virtues be the same in kind, though they may vainly struggle for the same degree; and the superiority of man will be equally clear, if not clearer; and truth, as it is a simple principle, which admits of no modification, would be common to both. Nay, the order of society as it is at present regulated would not be inverted, for woman would then only have the rank that reason assigned her, and arts could not be practised to bring the balance even, much less to turn it.
These may be termed Utopian dreams.-Thanks to that Being who impressed them on my soul, and gave me sufficient strength of mind to dare to exert my own reason, till, becoming dependent only on him for the support of my virtue, I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex.
I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man. In fact, the conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own reason; or on what foundation rests the throne of God?
It appears to me necessary to dwell on these obvious truths, because females have been insulated, as it were; and, while they have been stripped of the virtues that should clothe humanity, they have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny. Love, in their bosoms, taking place of every nobler passion, their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.
As to the argument respecting the subjection in which the sex has ever been held, it retorts on man. The many have always been enthralled by the few; and monsters, who scarcely have shewn any discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow-creatures. Why have men of superiour endowments submitted to such degradation? For, is it not universally acknowledged that kings, viewed collectively, have ever been inferior, in abilities and virtue, to the same number of men taken from the common mass of mankind-yet, have they not, and are they not still treated with a degree of reverence that is an insult to reason? China is not the only country where a living man has been made a God. Men have submitted to superior strength to enjoy with impunity the pleasure of the moment-women have only done the same, and therefore till it is proved that the courtier, who servilely resigns the birthright of a man, is not a moral agent, it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.
Brutal force has hitherto governed the world, and that the science of politics is in its infancy, is evident from philosophers scrupling to give the knowledge most useful to man that determinate distinction.

AL

1. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
From p. 199, 1st complete paragraph, “Your wickedness . . . .” to p. 200, almost at the end of the second complete paragraph, “. . . to induce God to spare you one moment. . . .”

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downward with great weight and pressure toward hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock. Were it not for the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun does not willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the earth does not willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air does not willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of God’s enemies. God’s creatures are good, and were made for men to serve God with, and do not willingly subserve to any other purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposes so directly contrary to their nature and end. And the world would spew you out, were it not for the sovereign hand of him who hath subjected it in hope. There are black clouds of God’s wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God, it would immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of God, for the present, stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, and your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the chaff of the summer threshing floor.
The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course, when once it is let loose. It is true, that judgment against your evil works has not been executed hitherto; the floods of God’s vengeance have been withheld; but your guilt in the meantime is constantly increasing, and you are every day treasuring up more wrath; the waters are constantly rising, and waxing more and more mighty; and there is nothing but the mere pleasure of God that holds the waters back, that are unwilling to be stopped, and press hard to go forward. If God should only withdraw His hand from the floodgate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God, would rush forth with inconceivable fury, and would come upon you with omnipotent power; and if your strength were ten thousand times greater than it is, yea, ten thousand times greater than the strength of the stoutest, sturdiest devil in hell, it would be nothing to withstand or endure it.

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God. However you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections,1 and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, it is nothing but His mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, peace and safety: Now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: His wrath toward you burns like fire; He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in His sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in His eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended Him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but His hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking His pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending His solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment. . . .

2. Benjamin Franklin, from The Autobiography
From p. 284, 1st complete paragraph, “It was about this time . . . .” to p. 285, the 13th virtue, “. . . Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”

It was about this time I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish'd to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I bad imagined. While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct. For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method.
In the various enumerations of the moral virtues I had met with in my reading, I found the catalogue more or less numerous, as different writers included more or fewer ideas under the same name. Temperance, for example, was by some confined to eating and drinking, while by others it was extended to mean the moderating every other pleasure, appetite, inclination, or passion, bodily or mental, even to our avarice and ambition. I propos'd to myself, for the sake of clearness, to use rather more names, with fewer ideas annex'd to each, than a few names with more ideas; and I included under thirteen names of virtues all that at that time occurr'd to me as necessary or desirable, and annexed to each a short precept, which fully express'd the extent I gave to its meaning.
These names of virtues, with their precepts, were:
1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Nature”
--(1) pp. 492-93, the first two paragraphs of “Introduction” in Nature: from “Our age is retrospective. . . .” to “. . . Let us inquire to what end is nature?”
--(2) From p. 494, the 17th line from the bottom, “In the woods, is perpetual youth. . . .” to the end of the same paragraph, “. . . somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”

(1) Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?
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(2) In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

4. Henry David Thoreau, from Walden
--(1) p. 892, the 2nd complete paragraph, from “I went to the woods because I wished . . . .” to “. . . to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever.’”
--(2) p. 896, the 2nd complete paragraph, from “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” to “I will begin to mine.”
--(3) From p. 910, the last paragraph, “On the 29th of April . . . .” to p. 911, end of the 1st paragraph, “. . . now some cliffy cloud.”

(1) I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

(2) Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

(3) On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the under side of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The merlin it seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe-sporting there alone- and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag;- or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud.

5. Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia”
From p. 683, the last paragraph, “She died. . . .” to p. 685, the first paragraph, “. . . giving a hideous and uneasy vitality to the whole.”

She died — and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world terms wealth — Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more, than falls ordinarily to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering, I purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey, which I shall not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and musical region of the country. Yet, although the external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way with a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within. For such follies even in childhood I had imbibed a taste, and now they came back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I now feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture of Arabesque, in the bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a colouring from my dreams. But these absurdities I must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither, in a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride — as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia — the fair-haired and blue-eyed lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.

There is not any individual portion of the architecture and decoration of that bridal chamber which is not now visibly before me. Where were the souls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold, they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment so bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so beloved? I have said that I minutely remember the details of the chamber — yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment — and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the sole window — an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice — a single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon, passing through it, fell with a ghastly lustre upon the objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window extended the open trellice-work of an aged vine which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold, with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Arabesque in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of particoloured fires. Some few ottomans and golden candelabras of Eastern figure were in various stations about — and there was the couch, too, the bridal couch, of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony, with a canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber, stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture. But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls — gigantic in height — even unproportionably so, were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds with a heavy and massy looking tapestry — tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans, and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window. This material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with Arabesque figures, of about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the Arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room they bore the appearance of ideal monstrosities; but, upon a farther advance, this appearance suddenly departed; and, step by step, as the visiter moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Northman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies — giving a hideous and uneasy vitality to the whole.

coure design

1. Start the class with some warm-up question and review last story
2. Give them a copy of the story
3. Play video to the students
4. Ask them to read the story or read the story together
5. Explain some difficult vocabulary
6. Activity: a game for group discussion
ask them some question from the story
8. Ask them how they feel about the story and give them homework

Teaching materiel: a copy of the story
Watch a video of the story
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXX-EqO_lPQ&hl=zh-TW

The Shoemaker and The Elves
Once upon a time there lived a poor shoemaker. He lived in misery because as he grew old he could not see all that well any more and, consequently, he could not work like he used to.

One night he went to bed sad, without finishing a repair job he had begun. In the morning he found the job done.
During the day he set out all the tools and material necessary to make a new pair of shoes for a rich customer.
"Tomorrow morning, when it will be sunny and bright, I will begin working on them," he thought.

But the morning after, instead of the leather he had left the night before, the shoemaker was very surprised to find a beautiful pair of brand new shoes. Later on in the day, the customer went by the shop to see how his new shoes were coming along. When he found a very nice pair of shoes ready, he was very happy and paid the shoemaker twice the price they had agreed upon. The shoemaker was very confused and wondered what had happened.

That night, he left out some more leather and the next morning he found another shiny and perfect pair of new shoes. These shoes were sold at an even higher price. Now the shoemaker left out leather and tools to his mysterious helper every night, and, every morning, he found a new pair of shoes.

Pretty soon, the shoemaker was able to save a good sum of money. When the shoemaker's wife noticed all the money the shoemaker had saved, she grew suspicious and demanded an explanation. When she was informed of the unusual nocturnal occurrences, she proposed:
"Let's wait until nightfall. We will hide and find out what's happening."
And so the shoemaker and his wife hid and, around midnight, saw two elves sneak into the shoemaker's shop.

The quick and skilled elves made a new pair of shoes in a flash. It was winter and the elves, dressed in ragged clothes, shivered while they worked.
"Poor fellows! They must be very cold," the shoemaker's wife whispered to her husband. "Tomorrow I will make them two heavy wool jackets. That way they will be warmer and maybe, instead of one pair of shoes, they will make two!"

The following midnight, next to the leather, the two elves found two elegant red jackets with gold buttons. They put on the jackets and were very happy. They danced shouting:
"What beautiful jackets! We'll never be cold again." But when one of the elves said:
"Let's get to work now," the other answered:
"Work? What for? With two jackets like these we are rich. We will never have to work again."
The two elves left the shop of the astonished shoemaker and his even more puzzled wife and were never seen again.

websites for reading

http://www.starfall.com/

http://www.literacyandnumeracy.gov.au/forteachers/literacy_resources/reading_websites.htm

http://families.owc.edu/Children/reading_lang.htm

An Anxious Man

An Anxious Man
James Lasdun, 2006 BBC National Short Story Award Winner

James Lasdun

James Lasdun is a British writer now living in the United States.

He has published two collections of short stories, The Silver Age and Three Evenings; and three books of poetry, A Jump Start, The Revenant, and Landscape With Chainsaw, which was short-listed for the 2001 Forward Prize. With Michael Hofmann he co-edited the anthology After Ovid. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. His awards include the Dylan Thomas Award for short fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, and first prize in the 1999 TLS/Blackwells Poetry Competition. He has taught Creative Writing at Columbia, Princeton and New York Universities.

Lasdun co-wrote the screenplay for Sunday, starring David Suchet and Lisa Harrow, which won both the Best Screenplay and the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature at the Sundance Film Festival of 1997. His story The Siege was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci into the film Besieged. Lasdun's first novel, The Horned Man, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2002. His second novel, Seven Lies, is also published by Cape, this year.


“An Anxious Man”

Joseph Nagel is worried about money. Not that he has too little. In fact, he and his wife have enough to invest, enough to form the basis of real riches. But as his wife’s investments prove less than sure-handed, Joseph begins to experience anxieties that teeter on the edge of hysteria. Then on holiday in Cape Cod, they meet another family with a certain amount riding on investments, and Joseph allows his daughter a sleepover with their new friends. Next morning, they have all vanished.


I
Joseph Nagel slumped forward, head in hands.

‘My God,’ he groaned.

Elise snapped off the car radio.

‘Calm down, Joseph.’

‘That’s four straight days since we got here.’

‘Joseph, please.’

‘What do you think we’re down now? Sixty? Eighty thousand?’

‘It’ll come back.’

‘We should have sold everything after the first twenty. That would have been an acceptable loss. Given that we were too stupid to sell when we were actually ahead – ‘

Joseph felt the petulant note in his voice, told himself to shut up, and plunged on:

‘I did say we should get out, didn’t I? Frankly, it was irresponsible committing all that money – ‘shut up, shut up ‘- not to mention the unseemliness of buying in when you did – ‘

Oh God …

His wife spoke icily: ‘I didn’t hear you complain when we were ahead.’

‘All right, but that’s not the point. The point is – ‘

‘What?’

Her face had tightened angrily on itself, all line and bone.

‘The point is…’ But he had lost his train of thought and sat blinking, walled in a thick grief that seemed for a moment unaccounted for by money or anything else he could put his finger on.

Elise got out of the car.

‘Let’s go for a swim, shall we, Darcy?’

She opened the rear door for their daughter and led her away.

Glumly, Joseph watched them walk hand in hand down through the scrub oaks and pines to the sandy edge of the kettle pond.

He gathered the two bags from the shopping expedition into his lap, bur remained in the car, heavily immobile.

Money … For the first time in their lives they had some capital. It had come from the sale of an apartment Elise had inherited, and it had aroused volatile forces in their household. Though not a vast amount – under a quarter of a million dollars after estate taxes – it was large enough, if considered as a stake rather than a nest eff, to form the basis of a dream of real riches, and Joseph had found himself unexpectedly susceptible to this dream. The money had made as a dealer in antique prints and furniture was enough, combines with Elise’s income from occasional web-design jobs, to keep them in modest comfort – two cars, an old brick house in Aurelia with lilac bushes and a grape arbour, the yearly trip up here to the Cape – but there wasn’t much left over for Darcy’s college fund, let alone their retirement. In the past such matters hadn’t troubled him greatly, but with the advent of Elise’s inheritance he had felt suddenly awoken into new and urgent responsibilities. At their age they shouldn’t be worrying about how to pay for medical coverage every year, should they? Or debating whether they could afford the dental and eye-care package too? And wasn’t it about time they built a studio so that Elise could concentrate on her painting?

The more he considered these things, the more necessary, as opposed to merely desirable, they had seemed, until he began to think that to go on much longer without them would be to accept failure – a marginal existence that would doubtless grow more pinched as time went by, and end in squalor.

After probate had cleared and Elise had sold the apartment, they had gone to a man on Wall Street, a money manager who didn’t as a rule handle accounts of less than a million dollars, but who, as a special favour to the mutual acquaintance who had recommended him, had agreed to consider allowing the Nagels to invest their capital in one of his funds.

Morton Dowell, the man’s name was. Gazing out at the pond glittering through the pines, Joseph recalled him vividly: a tanned, smiling, sapphire-eyed man in a striped shirt with white collar and cuffs, and a pair of elasticized silver sleevelinks circling his arms.

A young assistant, balding and grave, had shown them into Dowell’s cherry-panelled bower overlooking Governor’s Island. There, sunk in dimpled leather armchairs, Joseph and Elise had listened to Dowell muse in an English-accented drawl on his ‘extraordinary run of good luck’ these past twenty years, inclining his head in modest disavowal when the assistant murmured that he could think of a better word for it than luck, while casually evoking image after image of the transformations he had wrought upon his clients’ lives, and hinting casually at the special intimacies within the higher circles of finance that had enabled him to accomplish these transformations.

‘I think it’s just so much fun to help people attain the things they want from life,’ he had said, ‘be it a yacht or a house on St Bart’s or a Steinway for their musical child …’


Joseph had listened, mesmerized, hardly daring to hope that this mighty personage would consent to sprinkle his magic upon their modest capital. He was almost overcome with gratitude when at the end of the meeting Dowell appeared to have decided they would make acceptable clients, sending his assistant to fetch hi Sovereign Mutual Fund prospectus for them to take home.

‘What a creep,’ Elise had murmured as they waited for the elevator outside. ‘I wouldn’t leave him in a room with Darcy’s piggy bank.’\

Stunned, Joseph had opened his mouth to defend the man, but at once found himself hesitating. Perhaps she was right … He knew himself to be a poor judge of people. He, who could detect the most skilfully faked Mission desk or Federal-era sleigh bed merely by standing in its presence for a moment, was less sure of himself when it came to human beings. He tended to like them on principle, but his sense of what they were, essentially was vague, unstable – qualities he suspected might be linked to some corresponding instability in himself. Whereas Elise, who had little interest in material things (and who had been altogether less unsettled by her inheritance than he had), took a keen if somewhat detached interest in other people, and was shrewd at assessing them.

Even as their elevator began descending from Dowell’s office, Joseph had found his sense of the man beginning to falter. And by the time they got home it had reversed itself entirely. Of course, he had thought, picturing the man’s tanned smile and sparking armbands again; what an obvious phony! A reptile! He shuddered to think how easily he had been taken in.

‘You know what? You should invest the money yourself.’ He had told Elise.

‘That had crossed my mind.’

‘You should do it, Elise! It can’t be that hard.’ He was brimming with sudden enthusiasm for the idea.

‘Perhaps I will give it a try.’

‘You should! You have good instincts. That’s all that matters. These money managers are just guessing like anyone else. You’d be as good as any of them.’

And this in fact had appeared to be the case. After biding her time for several weeks, Elise had made her move with an audacity that stunned him. It was right after the September 11 attacks, when the shell-shocked markets reopened. Over ten days, as the Dow reeled and staggered, she bought and bought and bought, icily resolute while Joseph flailed around her, wrenched between his fearful certainty that the entire capitalist system was about to collapse, his guilty terror of being punished by the gods for attempting to profit from disaster, and his rising excitement, as the tide turned and he could see, on the Schwab web page over his wife’s shoulder, the figure in the Total Gain column swelling day after day in exuberant vindication of her instincts. An immense contentment had filled him. Thank God she had kept the money out of that fiend Dowell’s clutches!

But then the tide had turned again. The number that had been growing so rapidly in the Total Gain column, putting out a third, fourth, then a fifth figure, like a ship unfurling sails in the great wind of prosperity that had seemed set to blow once again across America, had slowed to a halt, lowered its sails one by one, and then, terrifyingly, begun to sink. And suddenly Elise’s shrewdness, the innate financial acumen he had attributed to her, had begun to look like nothing more than beginner’s luck, while in place of his contentment, a mass of anxieties began teeming inside him.

How exhausting it all was. How he hated it! It was as though, in investing the money, Elise had unwittingly attached him by invisible filaments to some vast, seething collective psyche that never rested. Having paid no attention to financial matters before, he now appeared to be enslaved by them. When the Dow or NASDAQ went down, he was dragged with them, unable to enjoy a beautiful day, a good meal, or even his nightly game of chequers with his daughter. Almost worse, on the rare occasions when the indices went up, a weird stupor of happiness would seize him, no matter what awful things might be going on around him. And more than just his mood, the management of his entire sense of reality seemed to have been handed over to the markets. Glimpsing in the Times Business Section (pages that would formerly have gone straight into the recycling bin) an article on mutual funds bucking the downward trend, he had seen Morton Dowell’s Sovereign Fund among the lucky few, and felt suddenly a fool for having allowed what at once seemed an act of astoundingly poor judgment to steer him away from that sterling, agile man …

God! All that and the nightmarish discovery that you could never get out once you were in anyway – couldn’t sell when you were ahead because you might miss out on getting even further ahead, couldn’t sell when you were down because the market might come surging back the next week, leaving you high and dry with your losses, though of course when it merely continued tanking you wanted to tear your hair out for not having had the humility to acknowledge your mistake, and salvage, sadder but wider, what you could.

Whatever you did, it seemed you were bound to regret doing it, or not having done it sooner. It was as though some malicious higher power, having inspected the workings of the human mind, had calibrated a torment for it based on precisely the instincts of desire and caution that were supposed to enable it to survive. One could no more help oneself than the chickadee that nested in the lilacs outside their living room could stop attacking its own reflection in the window all day long every spring, however baffling and terrible every headlong slam against the glass must have felt.

Wearily, Joseph climbed out of the car.
In the kitchen, as he unpacked the grocery bags, he made a conscious effort to flight off his gloom. Four days into the vacation and he had yet to relax. It was absurd. The weather was perfect, the rented house peaceful, the freshwater pond it stood by clear as glass, the ocean beaches beyond it magnificent. And at three hundred dollars a day for the house alone he couldn’t afford not to be enjoying himself.

His hand made contact with a soft, cold package inside one of the bags. Ah yes. Here was something one could contemplate with unequivocal relish: a pound and a half of fresh queen scallops for the grill tonight.

He had bought them at Taylor’s, while Elise ad Darcy shopped at the produce store next door.

Taylor’s was one of the glories of the Cape, and as always, it had been packed that afternoon, vacationers crushed up against the zinc slope, anxiously eyeing the diminishing piles of snowy white bass fillets or glistening pink tuna steaks, guarding their place in line with one foot while peering ahead to see what sandy gold treasures lay in the day’s salver of smoked seafood.

There had been an incident: two women had each laid claim to the last pair of lobsters in the tank. The woman who was first in line had been distracted, searching for something in her purse, when the teenage server came over. The other woman, tall and bronzed, in an outfit of some tissuey material slung weblike between thin chains of beaded gold, had silently held up two fingers and pointed to the lobsters, which the boy was already weighing for her when the first woman realized what was happening. She protested that she had been first in line, but the other woman simply ignored her, handing the boy several bills with an intense smile and telling him to keep the change, while the boy himself stood in a kind of paralysis that seemed as much to do with her immaculately constructed glamour training itself upon him at full beam as with the awkwardness of the situation. ‘We’ll be getting’ more in later,’ he had muttered lamely to the first woman. ‘Well, gosh …’ she had said breathily as the other woman, still smiling, strode serenely out, the two live lobsters swinging from her hand in their bag of crushed ice.

Joseph, who had observed it all, had felt vaguely that he ought to stand up for the woman in front. But nobody else had stirred and it didn’t after all seem a matter of great importance, so that in the end he had done nothing, a fact of which he had felt fractionally ashamed as he left the store.

At any rate he had his scallops – huge, succulent ones, with their delicate-tasting pink corals still attached. Lucky he’d bought them before hearing the day’s numbers, he thought, smiling a little. Otherwise he might have balked at the astronomical price Taylor’s charged per pound. He stowed them away with a feeling of minor triumph, as if he had snatched them from the very jaws of the NASDAQ.

There was no sign of his wife and daughter when he made his way down to the pond. He stood on the small private jetty that came with the house, wondering if he were being punished for his comment about the timing of Elise’s investments. Elise did have a punitive streak, and his comment had undoubtedly been offensive. Still, it was unlike her to vanish altogether without telling him.

A slight anxiety stirred in him. He fought it: he had noticed a growing tendency to worry recently, and he was aware that he needed to get a grip on it. They must have gone off to pick blackberries, he told himself, or maybe they had decided to walk over the dunes to the ocean. At any rate he would have his swim – across the pond and back – before he allowed himself to become concerned.

He stepped into the clear water, walked out up to his knees, then plunged in, drawing himself forward with leisurely strokes. The top few inches of water were sun-warmed; below that it was abruptly cold. There were no other people around. Thumbnail-sized water skimmers teemed on the surface ahead of him, thousands of them, jetting twitchily in every direction.

The ‘pond’ (he would have called it a lake) was a quarter mile wide. It took him twenty minutes to cross it, and by a determined effort of will he managed not to look back once to see whether Elise and Darcy had returned. At the far shore he climbed out to touch land, then turned around, half-believing that he would be rewarded for his self-control by the sight of figures on the jetty below their house.

There were none.

Easy now, he instructed himself as he waded in again. There was still the journey back before he was officially allowed to worry. But knowing that in twenty minutes you were going to legitimately succumb to anxiety was not very different from succumbing to it right now. He could feel in advance how, as he passed the halfway point on the pond, he would be seized by a mounting anger at Elise for not informing him of her plans, and how, as he swam on, the anger would change gradually to fear, which was worse because it indicated, did it not, that one’s mind had reached some limit of reasonable hope and switched its bet from her and Darcy being perfectly, if irresponsibly, safe somewhere to their being caught up in some disaster.

How wearying, how humiliating it was to have so little faith in anything, to be so abjectly at the mercy of every tremor of fear in one’s mind… Unballasted by any definite convictions of his own (convictions, he liked to joke, were for convicts), he appeared to have gone adrift in a realm of pure superstition. If I avoid listening to Marketplace for three days, the Dow will miraculously recover: It did not. If I close my eyes and hold my breath for seventeen strokes Elise and Darcy will be there on the jetty…

They were not.

He swan on, thrusting out violently from his shoulders, ropes of cooler water slipping around his ankles as he kicked back and down, as hard as he could, in an effort to annihilate the drone of his own thoughts.

The sun was low in the sky, banding every ripple he made with a creamy glaze. The light here! That was something else to relish. In the early morning it seemed to glow from inside the trees, spilling out from one leaf after another as the sun rose, a rich, gold-tinted green. In the afternoon it turned to this creamy silver. Then, it was the light itself one became aware of, rather than the things it lit. Right now, in fact, as Joseph looked across the pond, the glare of direct and water-reflected light was so bright he could no longer see the far shore. This seemed propitious, and he deliberately refrained from trying to squint through the dazzle, surrendering to it. He had caught this moment once or twice before on the pond, and it did have some mysterious, elevating splendour about it hat took you out of yourself. Everything seemed purely an occurrence of light: the water streaming glassily as he raised each arm for tits stroke, bubbles sliding over the curving ripples, the water-skimmers registering no longer as frantic insect hordes but careening saucers of light, the whole glittering mass of phenomena so absorbing it emptied your sens of anything but itself, and for a moment you had the impression you could not only see the light but taste it, smell it, feel it on your skin, and hear it ringing all around you like shaken bells.

Darcy was standing at the end of the jetty when he came through the glare. She was leaning over the water with a fishing net in her hand. Another girl was beside her, shorter and plumper, holding a yellow bucket. Behind them, a little further off along the beach, sat Elise, drawing in her sketchpad.

For a moment Joseph tried to resist the joyful relief that the sight offered (relief being just the obverse of the irrational anxiety of which he was trying to cure himself, and therefore equally undesirable), but it flooded into him. They were there! No harm had come to them! He swam on happily. How lithe and supple his daughter looked in her swimsuit, her legs growing long now, beautifully smooth, her brown hair already streaked gold from the sun.

A surge of love came into him, and with it a feeling of shame. How crazily out of perspective he had let things get, to have allowed money to loom larger in his mind than his own daughter! A few evenings ago she had been telling him in detail the plot of a film she had seen. He had pretended to be paying attention, but so preoccupied had he been with the day’s losses that even his pretence had been a failure. With a pang he remembered the look of dismay on Darcy’s face as she realised he wasn’t listening to a word she was saying. How could he have done that? It was unforgivable!

The girls darted off as he approached the jetty, running down a path that led around the pond. Elise remained on her deck chair. She greeted him with a friendly look.

‘Did you make it all the way across?’ she asked.

‘All the way. I see Darcy found a friend.’

‘Yes. She’s staying in the next house down. We’re invited over for cocktails later on.’

‘Cocktails. My!’

‘I said we’d go. Darcy’s so excited to have a playmate.’

‘Is she bored here?’

‘No, but you know how it is…’

‘I thought we might rent bikes tomorrow, and go whalewatching.’

‘Interesting concept.’

‘What? Oh!’

She was smiling at him. He laughed. Another of life’s unequivocal pleasures: being reinstated in his wife’s good graces. He rubbed himself dry. He felt refreshed, light on his feet.

An hour later and he and Elise walked over to join their daughter at her new friend’s house. A tall woman carrying a pitcher of purplish liquid greeted them on the deck.

‘They call this a Cape Codder,’ she said, holding her free hand out to Joseph. ‘Hi, I’m Veronica.’

She was the woman he had seen earlier on in Taylor’s.

She had changed out of the tissuey top into a sleeveless robe of flowing, peach-coloured linen, but Joseph had recognized her at once as the victor in the incident with the lobsters.

She poured the drinks and called into the house:

‘Sugar…’

An older man came out onto the deck, sunburned, with a strong, haggard face and vigorous silvery tufts sprouting at his open shire. ‘Hal Kaplan,’ he said, gripping Joseph’s hand and baring a row of shiny white teeth in a broad smile.

Veronica poured drinks and the four adults sat at a steel table on the deck, wh8ile the girls played down by the pond. She spoke rapidly, her large eyes moving with an intent sociability between Elise and Joseph. Within minutes, she had sped the conversation past the conventional pleasantries to more intimate questions and disclosures, in which she took an unashamedly flagrant delight. She and Hal were each other’s third spouse, she volunteered; they had met on a helicopter ride into the Grand Canyon. The girl, Karen, was Hal’s Daughter by his second wife, who had died in a speedboat crash. He and Veronica had been trying for a year to have a child of their own. There wasn’t anything physically wrong with either of them, but because she was approaching forty and they didn’t want to risk missing out, they had decided to sign up at an expensive clinic for in vitro fertilization, a process she described in droll detail, down to her husband’s twenty-minute sojourns in the ‘masturbatorium’. Don’t mind me, her tone seemed to signal as she probed and confided, I’m not someone you have to seriously… ‘How about you guys…?’ she asked. ‘How did you meet?’ As he answered, Joseph found himself thinking that if he hadn’t seen her in Taylor’s earlier on, he would have taken her for precisely the charmingly frivolous and sweet-natured person she seemed intent on appearing. And in fact he so disliked holding a negative view of people that he rapidly allowed his present impression of her to eclipse the earlier one.

Hal, her husband, had been an eye surgeon in Miami for twenty-five years. Now he was living, as he put it, on his ‘wits’. Judging from the house they’d rented – bigger, sleeker and glassier than Elise and Joseph’s – he was doing all right on them.

‘Karen is in love with your daughter,’ Veronica said to Elise, ‘she is in love with her.’

Elise murmured that Darcy was thrilled too.

Swallows were diving over the pond, picking off skimmers. As the sun went down behind the trees the water turned a greenish black, with a scattering of fiery ripples. The girls came up, wrapped in towels, shivering a little. Elise looked at her watch.

‘Why don’t you stay and eat dinner with us?’ Veronica asked.

Elise smiled: ‘Oh no, we couldn’t possibly…’

‘It’d be no trouble, really.’

‘Say yes, Mommy!’ Darcy cried.

‘We’re just throwing some things on the grill. It seems a shame to break these two up…’

‘Daddy could bring over our scallops…’

Elise turned to Joseph. Assuming her hesitancy to be nothing more than politeness, he made what he thought was the expected gesture of tentative acceptance.

‘Well…’

And a few minutes later he was bringing the scallops over from their kitchen, along with a bottle of wine.

Hal had lit the grill. Joseph poured himself another Cape Codder and joined him.

‘Lousy day on the markets,’ he said, with a rueful chuckle.

The older man’s long, rectangular face, full of leathery corrugations, hoisted itself into a grin.

‘You play them?’

‘We have a few little investments here and there.’

‘Time to buy more, is what I say.’

‘Oh? You think it’ll go back up?’

‘Like a rocket.’

‘Really? Even the NASDAQ?’

‘No question. The smart money’s all over it. I’m buying like crazy right now.’

‘You are?’ Joseph’s heart had given a little leap.

‘You bet! Intel at twenty? Lucent under four dollars? These are bargain-basement prices by any estimation. Nortel at two fifty? Not buy Nortel at two dollars and fifty cents a share?’ He gave another grin, the centres of his lips staying together while the edges flew apart, showing his teeth.

‘That’s extremely interesting,’ Joseph said, enjoying the unexpected feeling of well-being that had come into him. ‘So you think a recovery’s imminent?’

‘Right around the corner, my friend. Right around the corner.’

It was like drinking a draught of some fiery, potent liquor!

Hal jostled at the coals in the barbecue with a two-pronged fork. He called over to Veronica:

‘Bring ‘em on, sweetheart!’

Veronica went into the kitchen and came out with the bag from Taylor’s. Setting it on the table, she reached into the crushed ice and pulled out the two lobsters, one in each hand, and brought them over to the grill.

‘Joseph, do me a favour and take the bands off, would you?’

She was holding the creatures out towards him.

Gingerly, he removed the yellow elastic bands from the flailing blue claws.

‘Careful’, the woman said.

She caught his eye, giving him a sly, unexpected smile. Then she placed the living lobsters on the grill. Joseph had never seen this done before. The sight of them convulsing and hissing over the red-hot coals sent a reflexive shudder of horror through him, though a few minutes later he was happily eating his share.

At three that morning he woke up with a dry moth and a full bladder. He got out of bed and walked unsteadily toward the bathroom. Through the open door to the living room he glimpsed the sofa bed where Darcy slept, and was momentarily stalled by the realization that it was empty. Then he remembered that she was sleeping over at her new friend’s house.

A murky sensation, compounded of guilt and dim apprehension, stirred in him at the recollection of how this had come about.

He stumbled on into the bathroom, relieved himself, then stood in darkness, looking out at the pond. The moon had rising and the surface of the water, dimpled here and there by rising fish, shone brightly in its ring of black trees.

He had drunk too much, that was for sure, and overeaten. He recalled the weirdly euphoric mood that had mounted in him over the course of the evening: an unaccustomed exuberance. Partly it was Hal’s amazing confident predictions for the market. Several times Joseph had found himself steering the conversation back to the subject, raising various objections to the optimistic view, but purely for the joy of hearing this weather-beaten old oracle shrug them off. And partly, too, it was Veronica. With a few glances and touches she had deftly set a little subterranean current flowing between the two of them over dinner. He was a faithful husband, not even seriously tempted by actual bodily infidelity, but it gave him a tremendous lift to be flirted with by an attractive woman. Actually she wasn’t, inherently, as attractive as he had first though. Her chin was long and her nose looked as though it had been broken. But her evident conviction that she was desirable appeared to be more than enough to make her so. By the end of the evening he had been in an exhilarated state – drunk, aroused, glutted, his vanity flattered, his head spinning with the thought of the markets shooting back up ‘like a rocket’.

As they stood up to leave, Elise had called Darcy, only to be informed by the girls that Karen had invited her for a sleepover, and that she had accepted.

‘Not tonight,’ Elise had said, with more firmness than Joseph had thought altogether polite to their hosts.

The girls began appealing at once to the other adults. Veronica took up their case, assuring Elise that Darcy would be more than welcome.

‘We love having kids stay over. Anyway, we’re only a hundred yards away…’

Elise had looked to Joseph for support. Simultaneously Veronica had turned to him: ‘It’ll be so much fun for them, don’t you think…?’ She had laid her hand on his arm, and in the flush of his dilated spirits, he had announced imperiously that since they were on vacation, he saw no reason why Darcy should not sleep over.

Elise said nothing; it wasn’t her style to argue in public. But as soon as they were out of earshot, leaving their daughter behind with her new friend, she had turned on Joseph with a cold fury:

‘First you force us to have dinner with those people, then you walk right over me with this sleepover. You are unbelievable.’

More than the fierceness of her tone, more than the aggrieved wish to remind her that it was she, not himself, who had accepted the original invitation to go over for cocktails, more than the bewilderment at her objecting so strongly to Darcy sleeping over with her new friend, it was her phrase ‘those people’ that had startled him. All this time, he realized, while he had been blithely enjoying himself, she had been assessing this couple, sitting in judgment on them, and quietly forming a verdict against them. On what grounds? he had wanted to know. But as he opened his mouth to demand an explanation he had felt once again the familiar sense of uncertainty about his own instincts.

And now, as he listened to the insomniac bullfrogs croaking down at the pond, the image of Veronica walking calmly out of Taylor’s with the lobsters came back to him, and, with a guilty wonder at his wife’s powers of intuition, he went uneasily back to bed.

*


The day was overcast when he awoke later. He was alone. As he opened the curtains he saw Elise striding up the steps from the pond. She burst in through the kitchen door.

‘I am beyond angry.’

‘What happened?’

‘They’ve gone.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’ve gone. The car’s not there.’

‘With Darcy?’

‘Yes, with Darcy.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

He felt a loosening sensation inside him.

‘You checked inside the house?’

‘The doors are locked. I yelled. There’s no one there.’

Joseph threw on his bathrobe and ran outside, racing down the steps to the path. Rain had begun pattering onto the bushes. Reaching the other house, he blundered about the deck, beating on doors and windows and calling Darcy’s name. The place was empty. The windows had screens on the inside, making it hard to see into the unlit interior, but what he couldn’t see with his eyes his imagination supplied vividly: empty rooms, everything packed swiftly and scrumptiously in the dead of night, Darcy bundled into the car with the rest of them, then off out into the vastness of the country.

A feeling of terror swelled up inside him. He staggered back along the path and up the steps, legs shaking, heart pounding in his chest. Elise was on the phone.

‘Are you calling the police?’

She frowned, shaking her head.

If she wasn’t calling the police that must mean she didn’t think things were as serious as he did. This calmed Joseph, though the calm had an artificial sheen to it that was familiar to him from the rare positive days on the Dow, as though some essential fact had been temporarily left out of the reckoning. Then he remembered again that Elise hadn’t witnessed the scene in Taylor’s, and it seemed to him suddenly that his wife had no idea of what kind of people they were dealing with.

She hung up the phone and dialled another number. He realized she was calling nearby restaurants to see if their daughter’s abductors had perhaps just gone out for breakfast. The idea seemed unbearably naïve to him. He stood there, helpless, immobilized, looking out through the thickening rain.

She hung up again:

‘So much for that.’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘What do you propose, Joseph?’

‘I think we should call the police. What kind of car did they have?’

‘For god’s sake! I don’t even know their surname.’

‘Call the police.’

‘And say what? You call them.’

He picked up the receiver, but found himself reluctant to dial, as though to do so would be to confer more reality on the situation than he was ready to bear.

‘Maybe just one of them went out and the other’s still around here somewhere with the girls.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I don’t know. Picking blackberries – or maybe they went to the ocean…’

‘In this?’

‘It wasn’t raining earlier. Why don’t I go check? You wait here…’

He ran out of the house again. The sandy path wound around the pond to a series of dunes – the trees giving way to wild roses, then sea grass with sharp edges that cut against his ankles. The sand crumbled under his feet as he climbed, half a step down for every step up. He was panting heavily as he reached the high point, his heart pounding in his ears. Wind whipped rain and salt spray into his face. He looked down at the short. On sunny mornings the narrow margin between the dunes and the waves would already be covered with towels and fluttering beach umbrellas and little human figures in bright swimsuits – a touching image, it always seemed to Joseph: life blossoming frailly between two inhospitable elements. It was empty now, not a figure visible on the mile-long stretch of wet sand. Black waves came racing in with the wind, exploding onto the shore. Gulls flew screeching over the surf.

Was this it? Was this the catastrophe he had felt preparing itself inside him? His obscure, abiding sense of himself as a flawed and fallen human being seemed suddenly clarified: he was guilty and he was being punished. A feeling of dread gripped him. Childlike thoughts arose in his mind: propitiation, sacrifice… There was a clock, a valuable Crystal Regulator clock that he had bought for a bargain in Asheville earlier that year. If their daughter was at the house by the time he got back, he would sacrifice the clock. He would destroy it: smash it into pieces in the back room of his store. Or no, better, he would return it to the dealer who had sold it to him, ask his forgiveness for taking advantage of him…And meanwhile, to show he wasn’t only prepared to make a sacrifice in return for a guaranteed reward (the primitive religious state he had fallen into appeared to come complete with its own finer points of dogma), he vowed, right there and then, to change his entire life. Yes: he would devote himself to the poor and needy, give up drinking, overeating, flirting, obsessing about the markets, in fact he would tell Elise to sell off the shares and they would swallow the losses… The thought of this filled him with a sharp, almost painful elation: he seemed to glimpse in it the possibility of a new existence, one of immense and joyous calm. And even though he was aware in another part of himself that there was no prospect of his keeping a single one of these vows (that clock was earmarked to pay for this vacation), he turned back along the path full of faith and hope.

Veronica was at the house with the two girls when he arrived back. She was talking to Elise on the deck outside the kitchen. Seeing Joseph, she waved, laughing.

‘We were playing in a tree house in the woods,’ she called out. ‘Hal drove into town to buy pastries.’

‘Ah!’

‘We always lock the door. Hal likes to keep a lot of cash around.’

‘I see. I see.’

‘We headed back as soon as we heard you guys yelling…’

She grinned at Joseph as he stepped onto the deck. She was wearing a white T-shirt and gold sneakers, her bare legs golden against the grey rain. A mischievous look appeared on her face:

‘What were you thinking?’

He had had a moment of relief on seeing his daughter, but now he felt embarrassed.

‘Nothing… We were just, you know, wondering where you were.’

She touched his arm, her eyes sparkling with hilarity.

‘We freaked you out, huh?’

‘No, no…’

He turned away, as though from an uncomfortably bright glare. Mumbling an excuse, he went on into the kitchen. Already his panic on the beach seemed absurd, shameful almost. What a state to get into! He turned on the radio. The Marketplace morning report was about to come on. Lifting a watermelon from the fridge, he set it on the counter and cut himself a thick slice. He ate it nervously while he listened.

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