Science has its place in man’s search for understanding, but science and the imagination have tended to bifurcate in the modern world; only the true poetic intellect can end this long-established dualism.
Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it the Reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the mist.
Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile – an idiot.
I had done a deed – what was it?
Not altogether a fool,” said G., “but then he’s a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.
Horrors of a nature most stern and most appalling would too frequently obtrude themselves upon my mind, and shake the innermost depths of my soul with the bare supposition of their possibility.
It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles – the creation of supernal Beauty.
It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us – but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.
Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin; Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.
These were the days when my heart was volcanic.
Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.
The days have never been when thou couldst love me – but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.
This accident, with the loss of my insurance, and with the more serious loss of my hair, – the whole of which had been singed off by fire, – predisposed me to serious impressions, so that, finally, I made up my mind to take a wife.
He did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.
With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase.
Because it was my crime to have no one on Earth who cared for me, or loved me.
I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.
A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser.