1 Our enemy is not merely spiritual.
2 But to fail here, is not mere life or death.
3 The mere beauty seemed to cheer me; there was peace and comfort in every breath I drew.
4 The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living.
5 I have given orders to the night attendant merely to shut him in the padded room, when once he is quiet, until an hour before sunrise.
6 The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead.
7 He did not really care for any of the things of mere earth; he was in the clouds and looked down on all the weaknesses and wants of us poor mortals.
8 I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a mist, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move on without knowing where I am going.
9 It is nice at high water; but when the tide is out it shoals away to nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk, running between banks of sand, with rocks here and there.
10 So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have hypnotise him; and he remain on and on, till sunset come, and the Vampire sleep be over.
11 Under ordinary circumstances such a stench would have brought our enterprise to an end; but this was no ordinary case, and the high and terrible purpose in which we were involved gave us a strength which rose above merely physical considerations.
12 There is some fascination, surely, when I am moved by the mere presence of such an one, even lying as she lay in a tomb fretted with age and heavy with the dust of centuries, though there be that horrid odour such as the lairs of the Count have had.