My intellect remains; and is likely, I sometimes think, to absorb the whole man.

I still retain, (not only undiminished, but strengthened by the very events which have deprived me of everything else,) my thirst for knowledge; my passion for holding converse with the greatest minds of all ages and nations; any power of forgetting what surrounds me, and of living with the past, the future, the distant, and the unreal.

Books are becoming everything to me.

If I had at this moment my choice of life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries that we saw together at the universities, and never pass a waking hour without a book before me." So little was Macaulay aware that, during the years which were to come, his thoughts and cares would be less than ever for himself, and more for others, and that his existence would be passed amidst a bright atmosphere of affectionate domestic happiness, which, until his own death came, no accident was thenceforward destined to overcloud.
But, before his life assumed the equable and prosperous tenor in which it continued to the end, one more trouble was in store for him.

Long before the last letters to his sister Margaret had been written, the eyes which were to have read them had been closed for ever.