Dalgliesh

“These three scenes through which he had passed: — bowed Jaacob’s odd philosophy and startling groundwork— “Trust in nothing that you have not conquered for yourself;” Katie’s quiet home-parlor, her blush and glance of kindness, which perhaps understood his unspoken and sudden fervor as well as he did himself; and, beyond these, the sober, calm every-day minister, giving only an outside and momentary attention to those matters in which this young life had all its hopes at stake, minding his sermon, and only kindly indifferent to Huntley, had brought the youth on a long way in the education of his life. He could not have put it all into words, or explained it to the satisfaction of the philosopher; yet the shock of reality and actual life which brought him back to himself in the little smithy of Kirkbride — the warm light of Katie’s eyes which had stirred, with”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Works of Margaret Oliphant

“misdeeds. To tell the truth, poor Carry, being so unhappy, did not take pains to conciliate her neighbours. Some she took up with almost feverish eagerness, and she had two or three impassioned friends; but she had none of that sustaining force of personal happiness which makes it possible to bear the weariness of dull country company, and she had not taken any particular pains to please the county:”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Works of Margaret Oliphant

“higher platform, a different atmosphere, than she had known before; and she raised herself up after them with a half-bewildered sense of elevation, not understanding how it was; and so the long days which were so hard, and which nothing in the world could save from being hard, brightened towards the end, not certainly into anything that could be called pleasure, but into a sad expansion and elevation of heart, in which faintly appeared those beginnings of profound and deep happiness which are not incompatible with grief, and yet are stronger and more inspiring than joy.”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Works of Margaret Oliphant

“judgment, to which unfortunately Mr. Bonamy did not make much response. The Vice-Consul indeed had that half-painful, half-amused sense of being a better man than his son-in-law, which at once increases the pang of such a rivalry and makes it ludicrous. “Having known me to decline on a range of lower feelings, and a narrower heart than mine.” When a father utters in the depths of his own heart such a sentiment as this, it may be somewhat bitterly, but it must be with a sense that it is utterly ludicrous. Mr. Bonamy felt all through like the disappointed lover in the poem “Thou shalt lower to his level day by day;” for indeed Rita herself, when she became Mrs. Harry, soon came to have far less interest in matters”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Works of Margaret Oliphant