Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise; And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

Look at this tangle of thorns.

Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.

But in my arms she was always Lolita.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.