A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made. - Thomas de Quincey

Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labours in the evasion of cacophony.

how easily a man who has never been in any great distress, may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart - or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So a thick curtain of manners is drawn over the features and expression of men's natures, that to the ordinary observer, the two extremities, and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are all confounded - the vast and multitudinous line of differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of elementary sounds.

The silence was more profound than that of midnight; and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence.