The Misery

   "The Spring of the year was unusually cold; and the blasts of the northeast wind shook the large oriel window of his room, and made him shiver with cold as he crouched over the fire. A universal doubt shook every prop and pillar on which his moral Being had hitherto reposed. Something was continually whispering: 'What if all thy Religion, all thy aspiring hope, all thy trust in God, be a mere delusion? The more thou searchest into the mystery of thy Being, findest thou not that iron, relentless laws govern thee, and every impulse and thought of thee, no less than the dull stones beneath thy feet? What art thou more than a material arrangement, the elements of which might at any moment, by an accident, be dispersed, and thou, without any to care for or pity thee throughout the wide universe, sink into the universal night? Prate not any more of thy God and thy Providence; thou art here alone, placed at the mercy of impersonal and unbending laws, which, whether they preserve or crush thee, the universe with supremist indifference will roll onward on its way.'

   The misery of the incessant recurrence of such thoughts to a believing mind, he only who has experienced them can understand. They took away the charm from the human face, the glory from the sky, the beauty from the flowers: all these seemed to be the garlands round the victim's neck, designed to cheat it for a time into a little ease and forgetfulness of the cold, inexorable necessity that lay beneath."            - Thomas Arnold

Mrs. Randolph Churchill

   "Daughter of the millionaire New York sportsman Leonard Jerome, she was born with the proverbial silver spoon and in her teens was taken to Paris for the 'finishing' every wealthy girl was supposed to receive before being presented to Society. There she became a talented pianist and an accomplished linguist.

    Wife of Lord Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the Duke of Marlborough whom she married at 20, she was an instant success in the top circles of London society, being singled out for particular attention by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, who remained her devoted admirer for the rest of his life. Her brilliant career was paralleled by that of her husband whose spectacular rise to Parliament was snuffed out too soon by an illness.

   Mother of Winston Churchill, she received from him first the complete devotion of a little boy and then the open-hearted confidence of an ambitious young man whose career she did everything within her power to further. She firmly believed he would become Prime Minister although she did not live to see it.

    Mrs. Churchill grew older, of course, but never 'old' keeping her beauty, charm and drive to the end. Her star was not dimmed by two subsequent marriages, one of which ended in divorce, and her relationship with her son never faltered."  - Anita Leslie