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Looking at the matter from the point of theory only, we should say that a physician could not be otherwise than melancholy. A merry doctor! Why, one might as well talk of a laughing death's-head, the cachinnation of a monk's memento mori. This life of ours is sorrowful enough at its best estate; the brightest phase of it is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast" of the future or the past.
In the expression of the triumph and despair of love, not sicklied over with any thought as in most modern poets, only Catullus and Sappho can touch Burns. "Willie brew'd a Peck o' Maut" in the same way rides sovereign at the head of a troop of Bacchanalian verses; and the touches of rhetoric and convention in "Scots wha hae" cannot spoil, can hardly even injure it.
A stem of us, indistinct from the distance, the white Moro Castle reappeared, and rose frowning, tier above tier, like a Tower of Babel, with its summit veiled in the clouds, and the startled sea fowl wheeling above the higher batteries, like snowflakes blown about in storm; while, near at hand, the rocks on each side of us looked as if fresh splintered asunder, with the sulphurous flames which had split them still burning; the trees looked no longer green, but were sicklied o'er with a pale ashy colour, as if sheeted ghosts were holding their midnight orgies amongst their branches cranes, and waterfowl, and birds of many kinds, and all the insect and reptile tribes, their gaudy noontide colours merged into one and the same fearful deathlike sameness, flitted and sailed and circled above us, and chattered, and screamed, and shrieked; and the unearthly looking guanas, and numberless creeping things, ran out on the boughs to peer at us, and a large snake twined itself up a scathed stump that shot out from a shattered pinnacle of rock that overhung us, with its glossy skin, glancing like the brazen serpent set up by Moses in the camp of the Israelites; and the cattle on the beetling summit of the cliff craned over the precipitous ledge to look down upon us; and while every thing around us and above us was thus glancing in the blue and ghastly radiance, the band struck up a low moaning air; the light burnt out, and once more we were cast, by the contrast, into even more palpable darkness than before.
A few sallow, dirty children were playing listlessly about the space, in a melancholy way, looking as if their young minds were already "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and unconsciously oppressed with wonder why they should be born to such a miserable share of human life as this.
What is it Shakespeare or somebody says about some fellow's face being sicklied o'er with the pale cast of care? George's was like that. He looked green. "Finished with your uncle?" I said. He grinned a ghostly grin. "There isn't any uncle," he said. "There isn't any Alfred. And there isn't any money." "Explain yourself, old top," I said. "It won't take long.
The "churl," the "hind," the "peasant," the "first servant" and "second countryman," who were the mere transitions of earlier stories now are central in literature. They come with a challenge, and when we read Galsworthy, Wells, Sinclair, Dreiser, Hardy's "The Dynasts," Bennett we are conscious of criticizing life as we read. The pale cast of thought has sicklied modern pages.
In the course of the drama, Shakspere makes it sufficiently clear that the thoughts by which Hamlet's 'native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er, have come from the narrow cells of a superstitious Christianity, not from the free use of his reason. According to Montaigne, however, we ought to 'use our reason only for strengthening our belief.
Outwood evidently looked upon them as among the very faithful, and kept them by his aide. Mike on these occasions was silent and jumpy, his brow "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of care." But Psmith followed his leader with the pleased and indulgent air of a father whose infant son is showing him round the garden.
The Southern races are commonly accounted the more impulsive and precipitate: the English race, especially our New England branch of it, is supposed to be all sicklied over with repressive forms of self-consciousness, and condemned to express itself through a jungle of scruples and checks. The highest form of character, however, abstractly considered, must be full of scruples and inhibitions.
It was with an uplifted heart that I addressed Jeeves as he came in to remove the tea tray. "Jeeves," I said. "Sir?" "I've just been having a chat with young Tuppy, Jeeves. Did you happen to notice that he wasn't looking very roguish this morning?" "Yes, sir. It seemed to me that Mr. Glossop's face was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." "Quite.
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