[CentOS] Variable assigned to grep output - missing letter n!

> [scarolan at server:~]$ echo $myvar
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, co sectetur adipisci g elit.
> lots of letter  !
>
> Weird huh?

Ok, I'm a bonehead; I had this in my bash history:

IFS='\n'

That seems to have been the cause of the missing n's.  Now the next
question would be, how can I include the \n characters in my variable
string, without fudging with $IFS?