"North and South"

[fiefoe]

It's almost hard to believe that Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell also wrote the genteel Cranford books.

• It is possible she might have had little qualms of ill-concealed regret that Captain Lennox could not have united in his person everything that was desirable.
• A sense of indescribable weariness of all the arrangements for a pretty effect, in which Edith had been busied as supreme authority for the last six weeks, oppressed her just now; and she really wanted some one to help her to a few pleasant, quiet ideas connected with a marriage.
• not so much to satisfy oneself, as to stop the world's mouth, without which stoppage there would be very little satisfaction in life.
• Mrs. Shaw had as strong wishes as most people, but she never liked to do anything from the open and acknowledged motive of her own good will and pleasure; she preferred being compelled to gratify herself by some other person's command or desire.
• her own dear home, the place and the life she had longed for for years—at that time of all times for yearning and longing, just before the sharp senses lose their outlines in sleep.
• keen enjoyment of every sensuous pleasure, was balanced finely, if not overbalanced, by her conscious pride in being able to do without them all, if need were.
• Thomson's Seasons, Hayley's Cowper, Middleton's Cicero, were by far the lightest, newest,
• the glories of the forest. The fern-harvest was over,
• by it lay a dictionary, and some words copied out in Margaret's hand-writing. They were a dull list of words, but somehow he liked looking at them.
• The worst is, the wasps are impudent enough to dispute it with one, even at the very crisis and summit of enjoyment.
• a lighter, cleverer, more worldly man, and, as such, dissonant to Mr. Hale.
• 'Your poor mother's fond wish, gratified at last in the mocking way in which over-fond wishes are too often fulfilled
• The hard reality was, that her father had so admitted tempting doubts into his mind as to become a schismatic—an outcast; all the changes consequent upon this grouped themselves around that one great blighting fact.
• If the world was full of perplexing problems she would trust, and only ask to see the one step needful for the hour.
• but these factory people, who on earth wears cotton that can afford linen?
• Margaret never left her mother; bending her whole soul to sympathise in all the various turns her feelings took;
• 'And year by year our memory fades   From all the circle of the hills.'
• Railroad time inexorably wrenched them away from lovely, beloved Helstone, the next morning.
• If they came sorrowing, and wanting sympathy in a complicated trouble like the present, then they would be felt as a shadow in all these houses of intimate acquaintances, not friends. London life is too whirling and full to admit of even an hour of that deep silence of feeling which the friends of Job showed,
• The smooth sea of that old life closed up, without a mark left to tell where they had all been.
• Or, in the triumph of the crowded procession, have the helpless been trampled on, instead of being gently lifted aside out of the roadway of the conqueror, whom they have no power to accompany on his march?
• scrap of glass to reflect the light, and answer the same purpose as water in a landscape;
• carry on the war which compels, and shall compel, all material power to yield to science.'
• a hundred captains in England," he said, "As good as ever was he."' At her father's quotation Margaret looked suddenly up, with inquiring wonder in her eyes. How in the world had they got from cog-wheels to Chevy Chace?
• they tell strange tales of the wild extravagance of living indulged in on gala-days by those early cotton-lords.
• as each of them sixty years seemed to spin about me, and mock me with its length of hours and minutes, and endless bits o' time—