Date: April 26 1870

"Let the thoughts pass, an empty cloud!"

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"Why, as a volume seldom read / Being opened halfway shuts again, / So might the pages of her brain / Be parted at such words, and thence / Close back upon the dusty sense."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

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)

Date: April 26 1870

"Enough to throw one's thoughts in heaps / Of doubt and horror,—what to say / Or think,—this awful secret sway, / The potter's power over the clay!"

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"Like a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look, / For its base pages claim control / To crush the flower within the soul."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"You'd not believe by what strange roads / Thought travels, when your beauty goads / A man to-night to think of toads."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"Between the threads fine fumes arise / And shape their pictures in the brain."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his own interests except the retention of his snuffbox, concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)