Nathaniel Hawthorne

“ They accordingly muffled themselves in their warmest, and plunged forth through a back door into Ned and Elsie's playground, as the grim Doctor was wont to call it. The snow, except in one spot close at hand, lay deep, like cold oblivion, over the surging graves, and piled itself in drifted heaps against every stone that raised itself above the level ”

“ But there were the rudiments of a poetic and imaginative mind within the boy, if its subsequent culture should be such as the growth of that delicate flower requires; a brooding habit taking outward things into itself and imbuing them with its own essence until, after they had lain there awhile, they assumed a relation both to truth and to himself, and became mediums to affect other minds with the magnetism of his own. He lived far too much an inward life for healthfulness, at his age ”

“ I want you to be a man; and I'll have you a man or nothing. If I had foreboded such a fellow as you turn out to be, I never would have taken you from the place where, as I once told you, I found you,--the almshouse!"
"O, Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim!" cried little Elsie, in a tone of grief and bitter reproach.
Ned had risen slowly, as the Doctor uttered those last words, turning as white as a sheet, and stood gazing at him, with large eyes, in which there was a calm upbraiding ”

“ That castle in the air,--so much more vivid than other castles, because it had perhaps a real substance of ancient, ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,--that visionary hall in England, with its surrounding woods and fine lawns, and the beckoning shadows at the ancient windows, and that fearful threshold, with the blood still glistening on it,--he dwelt and wandered so much there, that he had no real life in the sombre house on the corner of the graveyard ”

“ The man who is to be put to bed here was never caught in your spider's web."
"No," said Doctor Grimshawe; "when my patients have done with me, I leave them to you and the old Nick, and never trouble myself about them more. ”

“ It would be a strange thing enough, if, when living families are turned out of their homes twice or thrice in a generation, (as they are likely to be in our new government,) a dead man should think he must sleep in one spot till the day of judgment. ”

“ But here," continued he, scraping away the snow with his shovel, a task in which little Ned gave his assistance,--"here is the headstone, just as I have always seen it, and as my father saw it before me."
The ancient memorial, being cleared of snow, proved to be a slab of freestone, with some rude traces of carving in bas-relief around the border, now much effaced, and an impression, which seemed to be as much like a human foot as anything else, sunk into the slab ”