Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.

Let the attempt be made, at whatever risk.

Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.

The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale!

Salt is white and pure - there is something holy in salt.