Alas! never had I loved him so well!

They will both be happy, and I do not grudge them their bliss; but I groan under my own misery: some of my suffering is very acute. Truly, I ought not to have been born: they should have smothered me at first cry.

The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.

But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!

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.

I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter - in the eye.