“...[M]y inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose. I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.”
“...[M]y inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose. I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.”
“I always liked dearly to hear what he had to say about either pictures or books; because without pretending to be a connoisseur, he always spoke his thought, and that was sure to be fresh:”
“~Do you like him much? ~I told you I like him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much? He is full of faults. ~Is he? ~All boys are. ~More than girls? ~Very likely. Wise people say it is folly to think anyboy perfect, and as to likes and diskiles, we should be friendly to all, and worship none.”
“The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.”
“I do not think the sunny youth of either will prove the forerunner of stormy age. I think it is deemed good that you two should live in peace and be happy - not as angels but as few are happy amongst mortals. Some lives are thus blessed: it is God's will: it is the attesting trace and lingering evidence of Eden. Other lives run from the first another course. Other travellers encounter weather fitful and gusty wild and variable - breast adverse winds are belated and overtaken by the early closing winter night. Neither can this happen without the sanction of God and I know that amidst His boundless works is somewhere stored the secret of this last fate's justice: I know that His treasures contain the proof as the promise of its mercy.”
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“I wait, with some impatience in my pulse, but no doubt in my breast.”
“I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.”
“Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.”
“A strong, vague persuasion that it was better to go forward than backward, and that I could go forward— that a way, however narrow and difficult, would in time open— predominated over other feelings: its influence hushed them so far, that at last I became sufficiently tranquil to be able to say my prayers and seek my couch. I had just extinguished my candle and lain down, when a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first I knew it not; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said: “I lie in the shadow of St. Paul’s.”
“I think if Eternity held torment, its form would not be fiery rack, nor its nature, despair. I think that on a certain day amongst those days which never dawned, and will not set, an angel entered Hades — stood, shone, smiled, delivered a prophecy of conditional pardon, kindled a doubtful hope of bliss to come, not now, but at a day and hour unlooked for, revealed in his own glory and grandeur the height and compass of his promise: spoke thus — then towering, became a star, and vanished into his own Heaven. His legacy was suspense — a worse boon than despair.”
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