You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all; you are a mere dream.
But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?
I like this day; I like that sky of steel; I like the sternness and stillness of the world under this frost.
I stood lonely enough, but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed: it did not oppress me much.
You have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face.
Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.
Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning.
I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.
Whatever my powers – feminine or the contrary – God had given them, and I felt resolute to be ashamed of no faculty of his bestowal.
What the deuce is to do now?
You transfix me quite.
A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut: it wandered away-away-to an indefinite distance-it died. The nightingale’s song was then the only voice of the hour: in listening to it, I again wept.
If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage – I mean marriage in the vulgar, weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment.
It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate.
The idea of seeing the sea – of being near it – watching its changes by sunrise, sunset, moonlight, and noonday – in calm, perhaps in storm – fills and satisfies my mind.
Nervous alarms should always be communicated, that they may be dissipated.
There is nothing I fear so much as idleness, the want of occupation, inactivity, the lethargy of the faculties; when the body is idle, the spirit suffers painfully.
On the contrary, I’m a universal patriot, if you could understand me rightly: my country is the world.
Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on?
Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England.