Date: 1854

"It was not the touch he needed most at such a moment--the touch that could calm the wild waters of his soul, as the uplifted hand of the sublimest love and patience could abate the raging of the sea--yet it was a woman's hand too."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"Her remembrances of home and childhood, were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1860

"She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas-a-Kempis, and the 'Christian Year' (no longer rejected as a 'hymn-book') that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of h...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"But his father was silent: the flood of emotion hemmed in all power of speech."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"Even now, her mind, with that instantaneous alternation which makes two currents of feeling or imagination seem simultaneous, is glancing continually from Stephen to the preparations she has only half finished in Maggie's room."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"'I will bring you the book, shall I, Miss Tulliver?' said Stephen, when he found the stream of his recollections running rather shallow."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"But there were things in her stronger than vanity - passion, and affection, and long deep memories of early discipline and effort, of early claims on her love and pity; and the stream of vanity was soon swept along and mingled imperceptibly with that wider current which was at its highest force ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1868

"Over me the billows roll, / Swallow up my sinking soul."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: April 26 1870

"For is there hue or shape defin'd / In Jenny's desecrated mind, / Where all contagious currents meet, / A Lethe of the middle street?"

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)