OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë/All her tresses backward strayed

XXIV
All her tresses backward strayed Look golden in the gleam, But her wan lips and sunken cheek And full eyes eloquently speak Of sorrows gathering near, Till those dark orbs o'erflowing fast Are shadowed by her hand at last To hide the streaming tear.
Oh! say not that her vivid dreams Are but the shattered glass Which but because more broken gleams Move brightly in the grass. Her spirit is the unfathomed lake Whose face the sudden tempests break To one tormented roar; But as the wild winds sink in peace All those disturbèd waves decrease Till each far-down reflection is As lifelike as before.
She thought when that confession crossed Upon her dying mind, 'Twas sense and soul and memory lost, Though feeling burned behind. But that bright heaven has touched a chord And that wide west has waked a word ​Can still the spirit's storm; Till all the griefs that brought her here, Each gushing with a bitterer tear, Round her returning sight appear In more tremendous form.
In glimpses of a spirit shore The strength of eyesight to restore Which coming death denied; That while the world was lost to her Her soul might rove a wanderer Through visional wonders wide.
And strange it is how oft in death, When reason leaves the brain, What sudden power the fancy hath To seize the falling rein. It cannot hold a firm control, But it can guide the parting soul, Half leading and half led, Through dreams where startling imagery Hide with their feigned reality The tossed and fevered bed.
It seems as to the bleeding heart With dying torments riven A quickened life in every part By fancy's force was given. And all these dim, disjointed dreams Wherewith the failing memory beams ​Are but the bright reflection Flashed upward from the scattered glass Of mirror broken on the grass, Which shapeless figures on each piece Reveals without connection.
And is her mirror broke at last Who motionless is laid . . . ·····
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/Some Salutary Lessons

​SOME SALUTARY LESSONS Only it was not Prussia we were living in, and it was not the year 1720, so the air tingled occasionally with other tales of little salutary lessons administered to our Royal upstart on his style of pursuing the pleasures considered suitable to a Prince. One day it was told of him that, having given a cup to be raced for on the Bob-run, he was wroth to find on the noticeboard of entries the names of a team of highly respectable little Englishmen who are familiar on the racecourse; and, taking out his pencil-case, ​he scored them off, saying, "My cup is for gentlemen, not jockeys," whereupon a young English soldier standing by had said: "We're not jockeys here, sir, and we're not princes; we are only sportsmen."
I cannot vouch for that story, but I can certainly say that, after a particularly flagrant and deliberate act of rudeness, imperilling the safety of several persons in the village street, the Crown Prince of Germany was told to his foolish face by an Englishman, who need not be named, that he was a fool, and a damned fool, and deserved to be kicked off the road.
And this is the mindless, but mischievous, person, the ridiculous buccaneer, born out of his century, who was permitted to interfere in the destinies of Europe; to help to determine the fate of tens of millions of men on the battlefields, and the welfare of hundreds of millions of women and children in their homes. What wild revel the invisible powers of evil must have held in Berlin on that night of August 1, 1914, after the Kaiser had thrown down his pen!
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Falling of the Thunderbolt

​THE FALLING OF THE THUNDERBOLT Into such an unpromising atmosphere, of national hostility the war came down on us in July 1914, like a thunderbolt. In spite of grave warnings few or none in this country were at that moment giving a thought to it. On the contrary, we were thinking of all manner of ​immeasurably smaller things, for Great Britain, although governing more than one-fifth of the habitable globe, has an extraordinary capacity for becoming absorbed in the affairs of its two little islands. It was so in the autumn of 1914, when we thought Home Rule and Land Reform covered all our horizon, although a thunder-cloud that was to silence these big little guns had already gathered in the sky.
Perhaps it was not altogether our fault if secret diplomacy had too long concealed from us the storm that was so soon to break. That kind of surprise must never come to us again. Many and obvious may be the dangers of allowing the public to participate in delicate and difficult negotiations between nations, but if democracy has any rights surely the chief of them is to know step by step by what means its representatives are controlling its destiny. We did not hear what was happening in the Cabinets of Europe, under that miserable disguise of the Archduke's assassination, until the closing days of July. Consequently, we reeled under the danger that threatened us, and were not at first capable of comprehending the cause and the measure of it.
"What is this wretched conspiracy in Serbia to us, and why in God's name should we have to fight about it?" we thought. Or perhaps, "We've always been told that treaties between ​nations are safeguards of peace, but here, heaven help us, they are dragging us into war."
So general was this sentiment of revolt during the last tragic days that it is commonly understood to have extended to the Cabinet. Six members are said to have opposed war. One of them, a philosopher and historian of high distinction, could not see his way with his colleagues, and retired from their company. Another, who came from the working classes, is understood to have resigned from thought of the sufferings which any war, however justifiable, must inevitably inflict upon the poor. A third, a lawyer in a position of the utmost authority, is believed to have had grave misgivings about our legal right to call Germany to account. And I have heard that a fourth, who had been prominent as a pacifist in the days of an earlier conflict, had written a letter to a colleague as late as the evening of August 1, saying that a war declared merely on grounds of problematical self-interest would create such an outcry in Great Britain as had never been heard here before—leaving us a divided and, therefore, easily vanquished people.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Alien Peril

​THE ALIEN PERIL But out of this failure of logic on the part of "deep-thinking Germany" a danger came to us from nearer home than the battlefield. One of the most vivid flashes as of lightning whereby we have seen the drama of the past 365 days was that which, immediately after the sinking of the Lusitania, showed us the full depths of the "alien peril." Before the war we had had fifty thousand German-born persons living in our midst. They had enjoyed the whole freedom of our commerce, the whole justice of our law courts, and the whole protection of our police. Many of them had married our British women, who had borne them British children. Most of them had learned to speak our language, and some of us had learned to understand their own. A few had become British subjects, and many had been honoured by our King. Our music, literature, and art had become theirs. Shakespeare had, in effect, become a German poet, and Wagner a British composer. The barriers between our races had seemed to break down, and even such of us as had small hope of a golden age of universal brotherhood had begun to believe that marriage, mutual interest, education, and environment were making us one with these strangers within our gates.
Then came a startling awakening. We realized ​beyond possibility of doubt that many thousands of our German aliens had been keeping up a dual responsibility, and that the chief of their two duties had been duty to their own country. We found beyond question that a settled system of espionage was at work in Great Britain, under the direction of the German authorities; that information which could only be of use in the event of invasion had for many years been gathered up by some of the people whom we had called our friends, and that day by day and hour by hour, as the war went on, secrets valuable to our enemy had been filtering through to Germany from influential places in this country.
What a shock to our sense of security, our pride, and even our self-respect! The horror of the discovery reached its highest point at the time of the sinking of the great liner, for then it was realized that there could be no limit to the expression of German cruelty. It is one of the effects of the spirit of cruelty to strike its victims with moral blindness. If it were possible that the German conscience could justify murder on the sea, why should it not justify it on land? Why should not our German governesses burn down the houses in which our children lay asleep? Why should not a German secretary attempt to assassinate one of our public ministers? War was war, and whatever was necessary was right. ​"We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and necessity knows no law."
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Coming of Spring

​THE COMING OF SPRING But perhaps, as Zola says, it is only the soft- hearted philosophers who are loud in their curses of war, and the truer wisdom was that of the stoical ancients, who could look with indifference on the massacre of millions. To keep manly, to remind ourselves that the generations come and go, that after all people die, and that more die one year than another—this should be the wise man's way of reconciling himself to the inhumanities of war. It is horrible doctrine, but certainly nature seems to speak with that voice, and hence the pang that came to us with the next great flash as of lightning, which showed us the battle-front at the beginning of the spring.
The long lines in the West had hardly changed so much as a single point to north or south since October 1914. Yet what horrors of conflict the intervening months had witnessed, bloody in their progress, though barren in their results! The storms of the spring (which in much of Northern Europe is only another name for a second winter) had gone through it all. Our soldiers had suffered frightfully, and some of us at home, awakening in the middle of stormy nights, had thought we heard the booming of far-off guns under the thunder of the sky.
Three millions of men were dead by this time, and that belt of green country, which many of us had crossed with light hearts a score of times, ​was nothing now but a vast graveyard stretching from the foot of the Swiss mountains to the margin of the North Sea. Here a charred and blackened mass of stones, which had once been a group of houses; there a cottage by the roadside, once sweet and pretty under its mantle of wild roses, now hideous with a gaping hole torn in its walls, and its little bed visible behind curtains that used to be white. And yet Nature was going on the same as ever—hardly giving a hint that the Great Death had passed that way. Our boys at the front wrote home that the leaves were beginning to show on the trees, that the grass was growing again, and that in the lulls of the cannonading they could hear the birds singing.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The German Tower of Babel

​THE GERMAN TOWER OF BABEL For the credit of human nature we feel compelled, in sight of such enormities, to go back to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory that invisible powers of evil are using man for the execution of devilish designs. But if so, they have had no mercy on their creatures. We read that when, in fear of another flood, not trusting the promises of the Almighty, the children of Noah began to build a Tower of Babel, the Lord sent a confusion of tongues among them to bring their design to destruction. The excuses the Germans have offered for their barbarities suggest a confusion of intellect that can only lead to a like result. Has the world ever before listened to such whirlwind logic?
When a German submarine has sunk a British merchantman and left her crew to perish we have been told that she was performing a legitimate act of war. But when a British merchantman has mounted a gun in order to defend herself, she has been said to violate the law of nations. When British battleships have blockaded German ports they have been trying to starve sixty-five millions of German people. But when German ​submarines have attempted to blockade British ports by drowning a thousand passengers of many nations on a British liner, they have been executing a just revenge. When a neutral nation in Europe has supplied foodstuffs and materials of war to Germany, she has been doing an act of simple humanity. But when the United States has supplied foodstuffs and materials of war to Great Britain she has been breaking the laws of her neutrality. When a brutal German officer has shot a British civilian in a railway train he has committed a justifiable homicide and become a proper person for promotion. But when a Belgian civilian has killed a German soldier who violated his daughter before his eyes he has been guilty of assassination and quite properly shot at sight. When Germany has refused to honour her name to a "scrap of paper" she has been a holy martyr obeying a law of necessity. But when England has honoured hers she has been a holy humbug, whose hypocrisy deserved to be exposed. Therefore God punish England! Above all, when God has crowned the arms of Germany with success on the battlefield, his most Christian Majesty, William the Pious, has always been with Him. Therefore God bless the Kaiser!
"Foreseeing my death," said Schopenhauer, "I make this confession, that I despise the German nation because of its infinite stupidity^ and I blush to belong to it."
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Invisible Conflict

​THE INVISIBLE CONFLICT Mr. Maeterlinck has lately propounded the theory that what we call the war is neither more nor less than the visible expression of a vast invisible conflict. The unseen forces of good and evil in the universe are using man as a means of contention. On the result of the struggle the destiny of humanity on this planet depends. Is the Angel to prevail? Or is the Beast to prolong his malignant existence? The issue hangs on Fate, which does not, however, deny the exercise of the will of man.
Mystical and even fantastic as the theory may seem to be, there is no resisting its appeal. A glance back over the events of the past year leaves us again and again without clue to cause and effect. It is impossible to account for so many things that have happened. We cannot always say, "We did this because of that," or "Our enemies did that because of the other." ​Time and again we can find no reason why things happened as they have—so unaccountable and so contradictory have they seemed to be. The dark work wrought by Death during the past year has been done in the blackness of a night in which none can read. Hence some of us are forced to yield to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory, which is, I think, the theory of the ancients—the theory on which the Greeks built their plays—that invisible powers of good and evil, operating in regions that are above and beyond man's control, are working out his destiny in this monstrous drama of the war.
And what a drama it has been already! We had witnessed only 365 days of it down to August 4, 1915, corresponding at the utmost to perhaps three of its tragic acts, but what scenes, what emotions! Mr. Lowell used to say that to read Carlyle's book on the French Revolution was to see history as by flashes of lightning. It is only as by flashes of lightning that we can yet hope to see the world-drama of 1914–15. Figures, groups, incidents, episodes, without the connecting links of plot, and just as they have been thrown off by Time, the master-producer—what a spectacle they make, what a medley of motives, what a confused jumble of sincerities and hypocrisies, heroisms and brutalities, villainies and virtues!
# The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 7/Inspired Talks/Sunday, July 28

(RECORDED BY MISS S. E. WALDO, A DISCIPLE)
SUNDAY, July 28, 1895. (Avadhuta Gita or "Song of the Purified" by Dattâtreya (Dattatreya, the son of Atri and Anasuyâ, was an incarnation of Brahmâ, Vishnu and Shiva.))
"All knowledge depends upon calmness of mind."
"He who has filled the universe, He who is Self in self, how shall I salute Him!"
To know the Atman as my nature is both knowledge and realisation. "I am He, there is not the least doubt of it."
"No thought, no word, no deed, creates a bondage for me. I am beyond the senses, I am knowledge and bliss."
There is neither existence nor non-existence, all is Atman. Shake off all ideas of relativity; shake off all superstitions; let caste and birth and Devas and all else vanish. Why talk of being and becoming? Give up talking of dualism and Advaitism! When were you two, that you talk of two or one? The universe is this Holy One and He alone. Talk not of Yoga to make you pure; you are pure by your very nature. None can teach you.
Men like him who wrote this song are what keep religion alive. They have actually realised; they care for nothing, feel nothing done to the body, care not for heat and cold or danger or anything. They sit still and enjoy the bliss of Atman, while red-hot coals burn their body, and they feel them not.
"When the threefold bondage of knower, knowledge, and known ceases, there is the Atman."
"Where the delusion of bondage and freedom ceases, there the Atman is."
"What if you have controlled the mind, what if you have not? What if you have money, what if you have not? You are the Atman ever pure. Say, 'I am the Atman. No bondage ever came near me. I am the changeless sky; clouds of belief may pass over me, but they do not touch me.'"
"Burn virtue, burn vice. Freedom is baby talk. I am that immortal Knowledge. I am that purity."
"No one was ever bound, none was ever free. There is none but me. I am the Infinite, the Ever-free. Talk not to me! What can change me, the essence of knowledge! Who can teach, who can be taught?"
Throw argument, throw philosophy into the ditch.
"Only a slave sees slaves, the deluded delusion, the impure impurity."
Place, time causation are all delusions. It is your disease that you think you are bound and will be free. You are the Unchangeable. Talk not. Sit down and let all things melt away, they are but dreams. There is no differentiation, no distinction, it is all superstition; therefore be silent and know what you are.
"I am the essence of bliss." Follow no ideal, you are all there is. Fear naught, you are the essence of existence. Be at peace. Do not disturb yourself. You never were in bondage, you never were virtuous or sinful. Get rid of all these delusions and be at peace. Whom to worship? Who worships? All is the Atman. To speak, to think is superstition. Repeat over and over, "I am Atman", "I am Atman". Let everything else go.
# The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 7/Inspired Talks/Sunday, June 23

(RECORDED BY MISS S. E. WALDO, A DISCIPLE)
SUNDAY, June 23, 1895.
Be brave and be sincere; then follow any path with devotion, and you must reach the Whole. Once lay hold of one link of the chain, and the whole chain must come by degrees. Water the roots of the tree (that is, reach the Lord), and the whole tree is watered; getting the Lord, we get all.
One-sidedness is the bane of the world. The more sides you can develop the more souls you have, and you can see the universe through all souls — through the Bhakta (devotee) and the Jnâni (philosopher). Determine your own nature and stick to it. Nishthâ (devotion to one ideal) is the only method for the beginner; but with devotion and sincerity it will lead to all. Churches, doctrines, forms, are the hedges to protect the tender plant, but they must later be broken down that the plant may become a tree. So the various religions, Bibles, Vedas, dogmas — all are just tubs for the little plant; but it must get out of the tub. Nishthâ is, in a manner, placing the plant in the tub, shielding the struggling soul in its path. . . .
Look at the "ocean" and not at the "wave"; see no difference between ant and angel. Every worm is the brother of the Nazarene. How say one is greater and one less? Each is great in his own place. We are in the sun and in the stars as much as here. Spirit is beyond space and time and is everywhere. Every mouth praising the Lord is my mouth, every eye seeing is my eye. We are confined nowhere; we are not body, the universe is our body. We are magicians waving magic wands and creating scenes before us at will. We are the spider in his huge web, who can go on the varied strands wheresoever he desires. The spider is now only conscious of the spot where he is, but he will in time become conscious of the whole web. We are now conscious only where the body is, we can use only one brain; but when we reach ultraconsciousness, we know all, we can use all brains. Even now we can "give the push" in consciousness, and it goes beyond and acts in the superconscious.
We are striving "to be" and nothing more, no "I" ever — just pure crystal, reflecting all, but ever the same, When that state is reached, there is no more doing; the body becomes a mere mechanism, pure without care for it; it cannot become impure.
Know you are the Infinite, then fear must die. Say ever, "I and my Father are one."
In time to come Christs will be in numbers like bunches of grapes on a vine; then the play will be over and will pass out — as water in a kettle beginning to boil shows first one bubble, then another then more and more, until all is in ebullition and passes out as steam. Buddha and Christ are the two biggest "bubbles" the world has yet produced. Moses was a tiny bubble, greater and greater ones came. Sometime, however, all will be bubbles and escape; but creation, ever new, will bring new water to go through the process all over again.