Love Quote by Wilkie Collins

Collins slips a moral claim into a line that sounds like a blessing, and that’s the trick: it arrives wearing the soft clothes of reassurance. “Well may your heart believe” makes belief feel like a natural, even healthy bodily response, not an argument to be tested. The persuasion is emotional first, intellectual second. You’re being invited to trust the speaker’s “truths” because they soothe, not because they’re proved.

Then the pivot lands: “‘Tis virtue makes the bliss.” Bliss isn’t luck, class, or scenery; it’s portable, manufactured from inside the self. The phrase “where’er we dwell” widens the frame to anywhere - marriage, exile, poverty, respectability, the cramped rooms and long shadows that Victorian fiction knows well. The subtext is almost corrective: don’t mistake comfort for happiness, don’t blame place for misery, don’t expect circumstance to do the work character refuses to do.

For a novelist working in an era obsessed with propriety and moral legibility, that’s not a neutral sentiment. It’s also a pressure tactic. If happiness follows virtue, then unhappiness can be read as a personal failing; suffering becomes evidence in a moral trial. Collins’s own novels often probe the cruelty of that logic - how “virtue” can be socially enforced, gendered, and weaponized - which makes the line feel like both sincere counsel and a portrait of the period’s moral weather. It’s a compact Victorian engine: consolation on the surface, discipline underneath.