Elegance Is Inferior To Virtue.

My Education Was Neglected, Yet I Was Passionately Fond Of Reading.

One Man's Life Or Death Were But A Small Price To Pay For The Acquirement Of The Knowledge Which I Sought

Our Feelings Probably Are Not Less Strong At Fifty Than They Were Ten Or Fifteen Years Before; But They Have Changed Their Objects, And Dwell On Far Different Prospects. At Five-and-thirty A Man Thinks Of What His Own Existence Is; When The Maturity Of Age Has Grown Into Its Autumn, He Is Wrapt Up In That Of Others. The Loss Of Wife Or Child Then Becomes More Deplorable, As Being Impossible To Repair; For No Fresh Connection Can Give Us Back The Companion Of Our Earlier Years, Nor A "new-sprung Race" Compensate For That, Whose Career We Hoped To See Run.

For A Moment My Soul Was Elevated From Its Debasing And Miserable Fears To Which These Sights Were The Monuments And The Remembrances. For An Instant I Dared To Shake Off My Chains, And Look Around Me With A Free And Lofty Spirit; But The Iron Had Eaten Into My Flesh, And I Sank Again, Trembling And Hopeless, Into My Miserable Self.

Our Faults Are Apt To Assume Giant And Exaggerated Forms To Our Eyes In Youth.