Lamech's sons were heroes of their race: Jubal, the eldest, bore upon his face The look of that calm river-god, the Nile, Mildly secure in power that… - George Eliot

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families . . .

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.