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The gloomiest of Hawthorne's short stories are spiritually sound and sweet: Poe's, on the contrary, might be described as unmoral; they seem written by one disdaining all the touchstones of life, living in a land of eyrie where there is no moral law. He would no more than Lamb indict his very dreams.
It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization.
It is thus that ebullitions in parts of our nature become touchstones for the whole; and the incidents within us seem hardly our own work till they are accepted and incorporated into the main current of our being. All invention is tentative, all art experimental, and to be sought, like salvation, with fear and trembling.
"I have never pretended that psychology was my forte," said he, feeling overshadowed by her cold commendation: he was not less acutely sensitive to the fractional divisions of tones than of eyelids, being, as it were, a melody with which everything was out of tune that did not modestly or mutely accord; and to bear about a melody in your person is incomparably more searching than the best of touchstones and talismans ever invented.
There is no way of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading.
The students of men and manners find him as good as meat and drink; but we cannot all be Touchstones, and perhaps, on the whole, it would be well if he were buried. Yet another and a still more potent factor is found in the habit which prevails amongst English fathers and guardians of sending out their incurable failures to the Colonies.
Such was the impression that Fuller Mellish gave. Bravo, Mr. Mellish, for an impression! Similarly the Touchstone of Sidney Greenstreet. We are accustomed to more physically attractive Touchstones, fools with finer bodies, and yet this keen-minded, stout person spoke his lines with such pertness and spontaneity that they rarely failed of their proper effect.
At Hamlet's line, "Absent thee from felicity a while" which Matthew Arnold, with impeccable taste, selected as one of his touchstones of literary style the thing that really moves the audience in the theatre is not the perfectness of the phrase but the pathos of Hamlet's plea for his best friend to outlive him and explain his motives to a world grown harsh.
Upon the discussions during the pendency of the resolutions, and upon the vote, by which they were carried, I make no comment, save only to record my exultation in the fact there exhibited, that great emergencies are true touchstones, and that henceforward, until this question is settled, whoever holds a seat in Congress will find upon, and all around him, a pressure strong enough to TEST him a focal blaze that will find its way through the carefully adjusted cloak of fair pretension, and the sevenfold brass of two-faced political intrigue, and no-faced non-committalism, piercing to the dividing asunder of joints and marrow.
Tested by any or all of these accepted touchstones, everything asked for was reasonable and fair in itself, and seemingly indispensable to the durability of the new world-structure which the statesmen were endeavoring to raise on the ruins of the old.