Sublime

A poor woman in a poor public-house was broken with a ruinous fine for giving a child a sip of shandy-gaff. Nobody supposed that the law verbally stigmatised the action for being done by a poor person in a poor public-house. But most certainly nobody will dare to pretend that a rich man giving a boy a sip of champagne would have been punished so

the spring of her heroine’s errors, and of many of ours. That spring is a philanthropy, and even a generosity, secretly founded on gentility.

He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on,

brevity which is the soul of wit.

Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops The hothead husband! Thus I scuttle off To some safe bench behind, not letting go The palm of her, the little lily thing That spoke the good word for me in the nick, Like the Prior’s niece … Saint Lucy, I would say. And so all’s saved for me, and for the church A pretty picture gained.

O no longer wants any visitors to the apartment unless he expressly invites them: “I don’t have time to be bored!”

Their most tragic figure is that of the man who is already free of all those ills he had, and is only asking to be allowed to fly to others that he knows not of.

In the long nights when there was little to do father had time to think. That was his undoing.