The underlying foundation of life in New England was one of profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered, melancholy, which regarded human existenc… - Harriet Beecher Stowe

For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.

But at midnight — strange, mystic hour, when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin — then came the messenger.

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you until it seems that you cannot hold on for a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time when the tide will turn.