Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin. - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

When tenderness softened her heart, and the sublime feeling of universal love penetrated her, she found no voice that replied so well to hers as the gentle singing of the pines under the air of noon, and the soft murmurs of the breeze that scattered her hair and freshened her cheek, and the dashing of the waters that has no beginning or end.

How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!

Thus not the tenderness of friendship, nor the beauty of earth, nor of heaven, could redeem my soul from woe: the very accents of love were ineffectual. I was encompassed by a cloud which no benefical influence could penetrate. The wounded deer dragging its fainting limbs to some untrodden brake, there to gaze upon the arrow which had pierced it, and to die - was but a type of me.