Sons of Fire, Volume II by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

"I wonder how many lives there are like mine in this prosperous England of ours, eminently respectable, comfortable, and altogether protected from the worst hazards of fate, happy even, according to the standard measure of happiness among the squirearchy of England -- and yet cold and colourless. I wonder how many men there are in every generation who drift along the slow current of a sluggish river, and who call that monotonous progress living. Up the river with the rising tide; down the river with the ebbing tide; up and down, to and fro, between level banks that are always the same, with never a hill and never a crag to break the monotony of the outlook.

"We have a river within a stone's throw of my gates which always seems to me the outward and visible sign of my inward and spiritual life, a river that flows past farms and villages, and for any variety of curve or accident of beauty might just as well be a canal -- a useful river bearing the laden barges down to the sea, a river on which a pleasure-boat is as rare as a kingfisher on its banks. And so much might be said of my life; a useful life within the everyday limits of English morality; but a life that nobody will remember or regret, outside my own household, when I am gone.