What is the reason that we find it so satisfactory to make excuses to ourselves—the only persons in the world to whom they must be altogether needles… - Letitia Elizabeth Landon

How incomprehensible is woman's love ! —it is not kindness that wins it, nor return that insures it; we daily see the most devoted attachment lavished on those who seem to us singularly unworthy. The Spectator shewed his usual knowledge of human nature, when, in speaking on this subject, he relates, that in a town besieged by the enemy, on the women being allowed to depart with whatever they held most precious, only one among them carried off her husband,—a man notorious for his tyrannical temper, and who had, moreover, a bad—or, as it turned out, a good—habit of beating his wife every morning. Well, all governments are maintained by fear—fear being our great principle of action ; and fear, we are tempted to believe, heightens and strengthens the love of woman.

To use the established phrase, three months of uninterrupted happiness glided away—a phrase, though in frequent use, whose accuracy I greatly doubt ; there being no such thing as uninterrupted happiness any how or any where.

Which is the best,
Beauty and glory in a passionate clime,
Mingled with thunder, tempest; — or the calm
Of skies that scarcely change — which, at the least,
If much of shine they have not, have no storms?