Date: 1855, 1856

"As his foot pressed the half-damp, half-dry sea-mosses matting the place, and a chance phantom cat's-paw--an islet of breeze, unheralded, unfollowed--as this ghostly cat's-paw came fanning his cheek, his glance fell upon the row of small, round dead-lights, all closed like coppered eyes of the c...

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1855, 1856

"For a moment, knot in hand, and knot in head, Captain Delano stood mute; while, without further heeding him, the old man was now intent upon other ropes."

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1855, 1856

"'Ah, my dear Don Amasa,' Don Benito once said, 'at those very times when you thought me so morose and ungrateful--nay when, as you now admit, you half thought me plotting your murder--at those very times my heart was frozen; I could not look at you, thinking of what, both on board this ship and ...

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1855, 1856

"The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites; and across the Plaza looked toward St. Bartholomew's church, in whose vaults slept then, as now, the recovered bones of Aranda; and across the R...

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1859

"Not one of the three could could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of mind, as from the eyes of the body."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1859

"No dust has settled on one's mind then [at breakfast-time], and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1859

"But you must have perceived long ago that I have no such lofty vocation, and that I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"For there is nothing more widely misleading than sagacity if it happens to get on a wrong scent, and sagacity persuaded that men usually act and speak from distinct motives, with a consciously proposed end in view, is certain to waste its energies on imaginary game."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"Consider, too, that all the pleasant little dim ideas and complacencies -- of standing well with Timpson, of dispensing advice when he was asked for it, of impressing his friend Tulliver with additional respect, of saying something and saying it emphatically, with other inappreciably minute ingr...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows -- such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden wi...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)