"Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth — ’Tis then we get the right good from a book.

The picture of helpless indolence she calls herself
sublimely helpless and impotent
I had done living I thought
Was ever life so like death before? My face was so close against the tombstones,
that there seemed no room for tears.

Poor France, poor France! News of the dreadful massacre at Paris just reaches us, and the letters and newspapers not arriving to-day, everybody fears a continuation of the crisis. How is it to end? Who ‘despairs of the republic?’ Why, I do! I fear, I fear, that it cannot stand in France, and you seem to have not much more hope.