I can hear those two voices now; their united melody still rings mockingly in my ears; the heavy perfume of orange-blossom, mingled with myrtle, floats toward me on the air; the yellow moon burns round and full in the dense blue sky, like the King of Thule's goblet of gold flung into a deep sea, and again I behold those two heads leaning together, the one fair, the other dark; my wife, my friend--those two whose lives were a million times dearer to me than my own.

Ah! they were happy days--days of self-delusion always are.

We are never grateful enough to the candid persons who wake us from our dream--yet such are in truth our best friends, could we but realize it.
August was the most terrible of all the summer months in Naples.

The cholera increased with frightful steadiness, and the people seemed to be literally mad with terror.

Some of them, seized with a wild spirit of defiance, plunged into orgies of vice and intemperance with a reckless disregard of consequences.