I can conceive no punishment so dreadful as keeping perpetual watch on our words, lest they betray what they mean to conceal ; to know no unguarded m… - Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Water—the mighty, the pure, the beautiful, the unfathomable—where is thy element so glorious as it is in thine own domain, the deep seas ? What an infinity of power is in the far Atlantic, the boundary of two separate worlds, apart like those of memory and of hope ! or in the bright Pacific, whose tides are turned to gold by a southern sun, and in whose bosom sleep a thousand isles, each covered with the verdure, the flowers, and the fruit of Eden ! But, amid all thy hereditary kingdoms, to which hast thou given beauty, as a birthright, lavishly as thou hast to thy favourite Mediterranean ? The silence of a summer night is now sleeping on its bosom, where the bright stars are mirrored, as if in its depths they had another home and another heaven. A spirit, cleaving air midway between the two, might have paused to ask which was sea, and which was sky. The shadows of earth and earthly things, resting omen-like upon the waters, alone shewed which was the home and which the mirror of the celestial host.

She sleeps!—so sleeps the wretch beside the stake:
She sleeps!—how dreadful from such sleep to wake!

Indeed it is a doubtful fact whether clever people are ever very agreeable ; they are too much absorbed by one particular pursuit, to bound lightly enough over those generalities which are the stepping-stones of conversation ; they feel as if they ought to say something worth remembering.