"[From a letter to Walt Whitman written, 1872] "I have read your poems with my door locked late at night and I have read them on the seashore where I… - Bram Stoker

No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.

I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, through wearing years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.

When duty, a cause, etc., is the fixed point, the latter force is paramount, and only accident or a series of accidents can balance it.