The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

His face was certainly overcast with anxiety, but his soul was calm and resolute. Having lit his fire, he placed his candle on the table, and, leaning back for a moment in his chair, while the flickering increasing light of his crackling fire and candle revealed to him, with a sense of snugness, his shelves crammed with books, and the windows covered with an ample crimson curtain, effectually excluding the chill morning air — he reflected with a heavy sigh upon the precarious tenure by which he held the little comforts that were left to him. Oh! — thought he — if heaven were but to relieve me from the frightful pressure of liability under which i am bound to the earth, what labor, what privation would I repine at! What gladness would not spring up in my heart!

For these men devoted to writing, the library was at once the celestial Jerusalem and an underground world on the border between terra incognita and Hades. They were dominated by the library, by its promises and by its prohibitions. They lived with it, for it, and perhaps against it, sinfully hoping one day to violate all its secrets.

To see men wholly led by affection, admired and censured out of opinion without judgment: an inconsiderate multitude, like so many dogs in a village, if one bark, all bark without a cause: as fortune’s fan turns, if one man be in favour, or commended by some great one, all the world applauds him; if in disgrace, in an instant all hate him, and as at the sun when he is eclipsed, that erstwhile took no notice, now gaze and state upon him.

They are universally considered to be the finest ever bred in England, and are now in a most thriving condition.

The receding depths of time and space, though they can indeed be haltingly conceived even by primitive minds, cannot be imagined save by beings of a more ample nature. A panorama of mountains appears to naive vision almost as a flat picture, and the starry void is a roof pricked with light. Yet in reality, while the immediate terrain could be spanned in an hour’s walking, the sky-line of peaks holds within it plain beyond plain. Similarly with time. While the near past and the near future display within them depth beyond depth, time’s remote immensities are foreshortened into flatness. It is almost inconceivable to simple minds that man’s whole history should be but a moment in the life of the stars, and that remote events should embrace within themselves aeon upon aeon.

I don’t know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made that song the most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or can imagine. There was something fearful in the reality of it. It was as if it had never been written, or set to music, but sprung out the passion within her; which found imperfect utterance in the low sounds of her voice, and crouched again when all was still.

Placed in the midst of arid deserts, where the fleet but timid antelope, and the cunning but powerless monkey fall his easy and unresisting prey; or roaming through the dense forests and scarcely penetrable jungles, where the elephant and the buffalo find in their unwieldy bulk and massive strength no adequate protection against the impetuous agility and fierce determination of his attacks, he sways an almost undisputed sceptre, and stalks boldly forth in fearless majesty.

He was a little light-haired gentleman, with undeniable boots, and the stiffest of white cravats and shirt-collars. He was buttoned up mighty trim and tight, and must have taken a great deal of pains with his whiskers, which were accurately curled. His gold watch-chain was so massive, that a fancy came across me that he ought to have a sinewy golden arm, to draw it out with, like those which are put up over the gold-beaters’ shops. He was got up with such care, and was so stiff, that he could hardly bend himself; being obliged, when he glanced at some papers on his desk, after sitting down in his chair, to move his whole body, from the bottom of his spine, like Punch.

To those who live in the narrow circle of human interests and human feelings, there ever exists, unheeded, almost unnoticed, before their very eyes, the most humbling proofs of their own comparative insignificance in the scale of creation, which, in the midst of their admitted mastery over the earth and all it contains, it would be well for them to consider, if they would obtain just views of what they are and what they were intended to be.

Let them exercise their sublime and boasted reason, I said to myself, in endeavoring to comprehend infinity in any thing, and we will note the result! If it be in space, we shall find them setting bounds to their illimitable void, until ashamed of the feebleness of their first effort, it is renewed, again and again, only to furnish new proofs of the insufficiency of all of earth, even to bring within the compass of their imaginations truths that all their experiments, inductions, evidence and revelations compel them to admit.