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Or this beginning of "Roads Around Pisa." "Count Augustus von Schimmelmann, a young Danish nobleman of a melancholy disposition, who would have been very good-looking if he had not been a little too fat, was writing a letter on a table made out of a millstone, in the garden of an osteria near Pisa, on a fine May evening of 1823."

Or this, a phrase in a description of a small fashionable watering place on the North Sea, "The very air had here in its embrace a scornful vigor which incited and renewed the heart. There was also a small Casino where the coquetry with the dangerous powers of existence could be carried on in a different manner."

And this description of an aging mother who died after hearing of her only son's execution. "She was a stringed instrument from which her children had many of their high and clear notes. If it were never again to be used, if no waltz, serenade, or martial march were ever to be played upon it again, it might as well be put away. Death was no more unnatural to her than silence."