Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance - show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed away.

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

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.

As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.

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

There is nothing more startling in human relations that the strong emotion of weak people.

... the strictness of to-day may have at any moment to be purchased by the laxity of to-morrow.