The ubiquity of the Divine presence is the only true support, and I am sometimes astonished how persons, who evidently do not possess that grand source of consolation, keep up their spirits under trials and difficulties. It must be owing to careless tempers and nerves of brass.

To be good and disagreeable is high treason against the royalty of virtue.

If faith produce no works, I see That faith is not a living tree.

... it is a most severe trial for those women to be called to lay down beauty, who have nothing else to take up. It is for this sober season of life that education should lay up its rich resources.

O jealousy, Thou ugliest fiend of hell! thy deadly venom Preys on my vitals, turns the healthful hue Of my flesh check to haggard sallowness, And drinks my spirit up!

The artful injury, whose venomed dart scarce wounds the hearing, while it stabs the heart.

My retirement was now become solitude; the former is, I believe, the best state for the mind of man, the latter almost the worst. In complete solitude, the eye wants objects, the heart wants attachments, the understanding wants reciprocation. The character loses its tenderness when it has nothing to strengthen it, its sweetness when it has nothing to soothe it.