Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.