MihaElla > Recent Status Updates

My best wishes will for ever attend the dear, the ever-dear lady! may her nuptials be happy! they must be so, if she marry the man she can honour with her love. Yet I will say, that whoever be the happy, the thrice-happy man, he never can love her with a passion more ardent and more sincere than mine.

“love is not a voluntary passion”

What hopes can there be, that a lady will ever esteem, as a husband, the man, whom, as a lover, she despises? Will not every act of obligingness from such a one, be construed an unmanly tameness of spirit, and entitle him the more to her disdain?—My heart is full: Forgive me, if I say, that Miss Howe's treatment of me does no credit either to her education, or fine sense.

I never saw the approaches of death in a grown person before; and was extremely shocked.—Death, to one in health, is a very terrible thing. We pity the person for what she suffers; and we pity ourselves for what we must some time hence in like sort suffer; and so are doubly affected.

All his plump muscles were in motion,& a double charge of care and obsequiousness fidgeted up his whole form,when he offered to me his officious palm. My mother,when I was a girl,always bid me hold up my head.I just then remembered her commands,& was dutiful—I never held up my head so high. With an averted supercilious eye,& a rejecting hand, half flourishing—I have no need of help, sir!—You are in my way.

Our courtship-days, they say, are our best days. Favour destroys courtship. Distance increases it. Its essence is distance. And, to see how familiar these men-wretches grow upon a smile; what an awe they are struck into when we frown; who would not make them stand off? Who would not enjoy a power, that is to be short-lived?

CAN I write all that is in my mind, say you?—Impossible!—Not the hundredth part of what is in my mind, and in my apprehension, can I write!

This man has vexed me heartily. I see his gentleness was art. Fierceness, and a temper like what I have been too much used to at home, are Nature in him. Nothing, I think, shall ever make me forgive him; for, surely, there can be no good reason for his impatience on an expectation given with reserve, and revocable.—I so much to suffer through him; yet to be treated as if I were obliged to bear insults from him!

Our hearts may harden and contract, as we gain experience, and when we have smarted perhaps for our easy folly.

This man have more terror at seeing me, than I can have at seeing him!—How can that be? If he had half as much, he would not wish to see me!—His motive love!—Yes, indeed!—Love of himself! He knows no other; for love, that deserves the name, seeks the satisfaction of the beloved object more than its own. Weighed in this scale, what a profanation is this man guilty of!

Encouragement and approbation make people show talents they were never suspected to have;

Persecution and discouragement depress ingenuous minds, and blunt the edge of lively imaginations.

See, what a fine thing scholarship is!—I had always, from a girl, a taste for reading, though it were but in Mother Goose, and concerning the fairies. Could but my parents have let go as fast as I pulled, I should have been a very happy creature.

[...] I will receive no more of your letters. You are too artful for me. You are an ungrateful and unreasonable child: Must you have your way paramount to every body's? How are you altered!

sir, behold these hairs! I am getting old. Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs. Old age—even if it blot the page—is honorable. With submission, sir, we both are getting old.

Nevertheless, as he was in many ways a most valuable person to me, and all the time before twelve o’clock, meridian, was the quickest, steadiest creature too, accomplishing a great deal of work in a style not easy to be matched—for these reasons, I was willing to overlook his eccentricities, though indeed, occasionally, I remonstrated with him.

I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace.

What have I to do with such headstrong spirits? I wish I had never—But what signifies wishing?—I am strangely perplexed: but I need not have told you this, after such a representation of my situation.

Look through the families, said she, which we both know, where the man and the woman have been said to marry for love; which (at the time it is so called) is perhaps no more than a passion begun in folly or thoughtlessness, and carried on from a spirit of perverseness and opposition [here we had a parenthetical debate, which I omit]; and see, if they appear to be happier than those...

O my dear! what a degree of patience, what a greatness of soul, is required in the wife, not to despise a husband who is more ignorant, more illiterate, more low-minded than herself!

How soothing a thing is praise from those we love!—Whether conscious or not of deserving it, it cannot but give us great delight, to see ourselves stand high in the opinion of those whose favour we are ambitious to cultivate.

I have considered, and considered again; but I protest I know no more what to say now than before. Only this: that I am young, like yourself; and have a much weaker judgment, and stronger passions, than you have.

What can I advise you to do, my noble creature? Your merit is your crime. You can no more change your nature, than your persecutors can theirs. Your distress is owing to the vast disparity between you and them. What would you have of them? Do they not act in character? And to whom? To an alien. You are not one of them.

You have such a sprightly turn, that, with your admirable talents, you would make any man in the world, who loved you, look like a fool, except he were such a one as Lovelace.

I,an unlearned,an unlogical girl,younger by near a third than yourself,will venture(so assured am I of the justice of my cause)to put my fate upon an issue with you:with you,sir,who have had the advantage of an academical education;whose mind must have been strengthened by observation,& learned conversation,& who,pardon my going so low,have been accustomed to give choke-pears to those you vouchsafe to write against

I don't know what to do,not I!God forgive me,but I am very impatient! I wish—but I don't know what to wish,without a sin.Yet I wish it would please God to take me to his mercy.I can meet with none here.What a world is this!What is there in it desirable?The good we hope for,so strangely mixed,that one knows not what to wish for!& one half of mankind tormenting the other,& being tormented themselves in tormenting

Upon my life, my dear, I have often thought, that many of us are mere babies in matrimony: perverse fools, when too much indulged and humoured; creeping slaves, when treated harshly. But shall it be said, that fear makes us more gentle obligers than love?—Forbid it, Honour! Forbid it, Gratitude! Forbid it, Justice! that any woman of sense should give occasion to have this said of her!

Permit me, however,to subjoin, that well may your father love your mother,as you say he does.A wife who has no will but his! But were there not,think you, some struggles between them at first, gout out of the question?—Your mother, when a maiden, had, as I have heard (and it is very likely) a good share of those lively spirits which she liked in your father.She has none of them now.How came they to be dissipated?

I remember that you once made an observation [...] that to excel in theory, and to excel in practice, generally required different talents; which did not always meet in the same person.

The vein is opened—Shall I let it flow? How difficult to withstand constitutional foibles!

I have hinted before, that I could almost wish my mother & Mr Hickman would make a match of it,& I here repeat my wishes. What signifies a difference of fifteen or twenty years, especially when the lady has spirits that will make her young a long time, and the lover is a mighty sober man? I think, verily, I could like him better for a papa than for a nearer relation, and they are strange admirers of one another.