the tyranny of the human face - Thomas De Quincey

But the stream of London, charity flows in a channel which, though deep and mighty, is yet noiseless and underground; not obvious or readily accessible to poor houseless wanderers: and it cannot be denied that the outside air and frame-work of London society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive.

In fact, every intricate and untried path in life, where it was from the first a matter of arbitrary choice to enter upon it or avoid it, is effectually a path through a vast Hercynian forest, unexplored and unmapped, where each several turn in your advance leaves you open to new anticipations of that is next to be expected, and consequently open to altered valuations of all that has been already traversed. Even the character of your own absolute experience, past and gone, which (if any thing in this world) you might surely answer for as sealed and settled for ever - even this you must submit to hold in suspense, as a thing conditional and contingent upon what is yet come - liable to have its provisional character affirmed or reversed, according to the new combinations into which it may enter with elements only yet perhaps in the earliest stages of development.

And when I was told insultingly to cease 'my girlish tears,' that word 'girlish' had no sting for me, except as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart - that a girl was the sweetest thing I, in my short life, had known - that a girl it was who had crowned the earth with beauty, and had opened to my thirst fountains of pure celestial love, from which, in this world, I was to drink no more.