Don't you think that any secret course is an unworthy one?

Good never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning.

It was the momentary yielding of a nature that had been disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not quite given up all its hopeful yearnings yet.

and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.

I could settle down into a state of equable low spirits, and resign myself to coffee.

I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing.

It was very dark; but in the murky sky there were masses of cloud which shone with a lurid light, like monstrous heaps of copper that had been heated in a furnace, and were growing cold.