Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,--the ties that have made others dependent on us,--and would cut them in two.

The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them.

Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.