Chapter 2

• “the diversity and contrast that subsisted in our characters drew us nearer together.”
• “While my companion contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I delighted in investigating their causes.”
• “The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful hope”
• “Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate”
• “I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa.”
• “a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature”
• “My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge.”
• “Wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame”
• “I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight (…) so soon as the dazzling vanished the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. (…) I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.”
• “excited by this catastrophe”
• “this almost miraculous change of inclination and will was the immediate suggestion of the guardian angel of my life – the last effort made by the spirit of preservation to avert the storm that was even then hanging in the stars, and ready to envelope me. Her victory was announced by an unusual tranquillity and gladness of soul.”
• “It was a strong effort of the spirit of good; but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter terrible destruction.”
• ‘it became a torrent which, in its course, has swept all my hopes and joys.’
• No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself.
• My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.
• It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin.
• I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life
• Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination