Theodore Winthrop

“ You think me weak, perhaps, Wade, for my doubt of success; but remember that I have been at this vain search over England and on the Continent for five months.”
“But understand. Wade,” said Biddulph, “that we do not give it up, although we have found no clew.”
“Give it up!” cried Brent with fervor. “I live for that alone. When the hope ends, I end.”
How worn he looked, “with grief that’s beauty’s canker!” Life was wasting from him, as it ever does when man pursues the elusive and unattained. ”

“ Such is the square at the very centre of the centre of the world, as I saw it from Smorley’s corner window, while dining in the June twilight, the evening of my arrival in London.
I sat after dinner looking complacently out upon the landscape. A man never attains to that stolidity of content except in England, where the air’s exciting oxygen is well weakened with fog, and the air’s exhilarating ozone is quite discharged from dancing attendance. London and England were not strange to me ”

“ A bronze footman, on a column sixteen hundred feet high, or thereabouts, stands at the foot of the square, hailing that fugacious enclosure from under a nautical cocked hat to do its duty, as England expects everything English will, and not to run away from the ugly edifice above. ”