My grandmother made her home at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the youngest of whom was only eight when their father died.

Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.

I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again.

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.

Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his market.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope.