Merivel: A Man of His Time

It is merely that I have been held in an embrace so strong by the journey that I find I have relinquished the will to arrive.

But such are our days. Such are the days and times of Every Man and, no matter how hard we work and strive, we can never know when something shall be given to us and when it will be taken away.

I could ardently have wished that he had not passed away so sprawled as he was upon a heap of dirty Laundry, but there I could do nothing. The World is as it chooses to be and he was one who knew it well.

More than once my thoughts returned to Wise Nell and her blood of swallows. In short, I began to wonder whether all cures of sadness do not have within them some element of magic that is beyond my understanding.

A game of shuttlecock: And I thought how there had not been an evening as sweet as this one at Bidnold for many a long time, and how it was as if all my Melancholy had been swept from my heart and sent by the Shuttlecock into some faraway void.

Versailles: The best I can set down is to say that the whole seemed, almost, to flow in its wondrous horizontal order, and its colours of pink brick and cream stone to rise up in one harmonous chord, as though it had been conjured there, not be any architect but by a composer of Music.

he had sweetly conjured for me an image of the Paradise in which my Parents now resided. It was, as befitting my Father's trade, a Haberdasher's Paradise, with clouds made of wool and Feather Trees waving in the wind, and paths strewn with pearl buttons and fields of linen-weave and houses made of Buckram. And sometimes, when melancholy struck me down, I had tried to imagine this fanciful kingdom, with my Mother and Father in it, and my Mother exclaiming, "Oh, do look, dearest, a Ribbon Grove ! Do you see how pretty it is !