If any one judge it hard that men should be made with ambitions to whose objects they can never attain, I answer, ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration; and no man ever followed the truth, which is the one path of aspiration, and in the end complained that he had been made this way or that.

Man is made to be that which he is made most capable of desiring--but it goes without saying that he must desire the thing itself and not its shadow.

Man is of the truth, and while he follows a lie, no indication his nature yields will hold, except the fear, the discontent, the sickness of soul, that tell him he is wrong.

If he say, "I care not for what you call the substance--it is to me the shadow; I want what you call the shadow," the only answer is, that, to all eternity, he can never have it: a shadow can never be had.
Ginevra was hardly the same child after the experience of that terrible morning.

At no time very much at home with her father, something had now come between them, to remove which all her struggles to love him as before were unavailing.