Thomas de Quincey

En anglais : "To this hour I have never heard a syllable about her. This, amongst such troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction. If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London, perhaps even within a few feet of each other — a barrier no wider, in a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity ! During some years I hoped that she did live; and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical use of the word Myriad, I must, on my different visits to London, have looked into many myriads of female faces, in the hope of meeting Ann."