Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey-moon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic - the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which make the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

I couldn't live in peace if I put the shadow of a willful sin between myself and God.

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one's life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.

Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.

All writing seems to me worse in the state of proof than in any other form. In manuscript one's own wisdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof it has the effect of one's private furniture repeated in the shop windows. And then there is the sense that the worst errors will go to press unnoticed!

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.