.

* * *

When you have said to yourself that you will kill any one, the world
only seems to hold yourself and him, and God--who will see the justice
done.

* * *

What is it that love does to a woman?--without it she only sleeps; with
it, alone, she lives.

* * *

A great love is an absolute isolation, and an absolute absorption.
Nothing lives or moves or breathes, save one life: for one life alone
the sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and
the stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem
but ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice
audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all
eternity can be but its heritage alone.

* * *

Is Nature kind or cruel? Who can tell?

The cyclone comes, or the earthquake; the great wave rises and swallows
the cities and the villages, and goes back whence it came; the earth
yawns, and devours the pretty towns and the sleeping children, the
gardens where the lovers were sitting, and the churches where women
prayed, and then the morass dries up and the gulf unites again. Men
build afresh, and the grass grows, and the trees, and all the flowering
seasons come back as of old. But the dead are dead: nothing changes
that!

As it is with the earth, so it is with our life; our own poor, short,
little life, that is all we can really call our own.

Calamities shatter, and despair engulfs it; and yet after a time the
chasm seems to close; the storm wave seems to roll back; the leaves and
the grass return; and we make new dwellings. That is, the daily ways of
living are resumed, and the common tricks of our speech and act are as
they used to be before disaster came upon us. Then wise people say, he
or she has "got over it." Alas, alas! the drowned children will not come
back to us; the love that was struck down, the prayer that was silenced,
the altar that was ruined, the garden that was ravished, they are all
gone for ever,--for ever, for ever! Yet we live; because grief does not
always kill, and often does not speak.

* * *

I crept through the myrtles downward, away from the house where the
statue lay shattered. The earliest of the nightingales of the year was
beginning her lay in some leafy covert hard by, but never would he hear
music in their piping again; never, never: any more than I should h