Letter 2

• “I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection.”
• “I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine.”
• ‘The absence of an object of which I now feel is the most severe evil. I have no friend.’
• “it is still a greater evil to me that I am self-educated: for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild on common; and read nothing but our uncle Thomas’s books of voyage.”
• “A youth passed in solitude, my best years spent in under your gentle and feminine fosterage.”
• “‘What a noble fellow!’ you will exclaim. He is so; but then he is wholly uneducated (…) which, while it renders his conduct more astonishing, detracts from the interest and sympathy which otherwise he would command.”
• “Yet do no suppose, because I complain a little, or because I can conceive a consolation for my toils which I may never know, that I am unwavering in my resolution. Those are fixed as fate”
• “I shall do nothing rashly (…) whenever the safety of others is committed to my care.”
• “but I shall kill no albatross, therefore do not be alarmed for my safety, or if I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the Ancient Mariner.”
• “there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men.”
• I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of the ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets.