To strain, to be:

"With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints"

#Dickens

I love this passage, an early passage from TTC.

I quote:

End of Quote:

This is about horses straining to carry a carriage through winters ice and mud.

I love the selfless image of service. Perhaps I fully hope it is one of voluntary strength.

I love what it symbolizes to move forward.

I love what the physical effort kindles.

Perhaps horses are animals. But I love the Godly heart they carry, brave and Kingly.

A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! "

#Dickens

The raggedest nightcap, awry on the wretchedest head, had this crooked significance in it:

?I know how hard it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself; but do you know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to destroy life in you??

- Dickens

wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease?a

terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.

#dickens

In "A Tale of Two Cities", Dickens says life as a set of "Momentary fancies" that by implication pass by.

Be it a dream or a spectacle of a ruin!

His words.

Mr. Cruncher came forward sideways, with one of his shoulders in advance of him.

#dickens. Very English. Has a bit wodehousey in it.

Inspired writing of Dickens:

Two score and twelve were told off. From the farmer-general of seventy, whose riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress of twenty, whose poverty and obscurity could not save her. Physical diseases, engendered in the vices and neglects of men, will seize on victims of all degrees; and the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference, smote equally with out distinction.

#Dickens

Pale Blue Dot:

Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some, so remote, from this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their, rays have even yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything, is suffered or done:

I am on page 78 of A tale of two cities. Its continuation of rich dense beauty is staggering to me.