Always plunged in reveries, realities displeased him.

As a child he could never touch a sharp instrument without injuring himself with it; as a man, he never found himself face to face with a being different from himself without being wounded by the living contradiction...
"He was preserved from constant antagonism by a voluntary and almost inveterate habit of never seeing or hearing any thing which was disagreeable to him, unless it touched upon his personal affections.

The beings who did not think as he did, were only phantoms in his eyes.

As his manners were polished and graceful, it was easy to mistake his cold disdain on insurmountable aversion for benevolent courtesy...
"He never spent an hour in open-hearted expansiveness, without compensating for it by a season of reserve.

The moral causes which induced such reserve were too slight, too subtle, to be discovered by the naked eye.