And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.
Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution.
This story is told through the eyes of a madman. Who, like all of us, believed he was sane.
She came and departed as a shadow.
In truth, the man who would behold aright the glory of God upon earth must in solitude behold that glory.
He had the ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy, sensibility, and enthusiasm.
So violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.
I reflected that man is the veriest slave of custom, and that many points in the routine of his existence are deemed essentially important, which are only so at all by his having rendered them habitual.
I dare say you have often observed this disposition to temporize, or to procrastinate, in people who are labouring under any very poignant sorrow. Their powers of mind seem to be rendered torpid, so that they have a horror of any thing like action, and like nothing in the world so well as to liequietly in bed and “nurse their grief,” as the old ladies express it- that is to say, ruminate over the trouble.
Nor is it any argument against bulk being an object with God, that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it.
And spite of all dogmas, current in all ages, One settled fact is better than ten sages.
He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower – is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.
Who does not remember that, at such a time as this, the eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow, and sees in innumerable far-off places, the wo which is close at hand?
Eager vehemence of desire for life.
MISERY is manifold.
What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones – that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief.
That holy dream – that holy dream, While all the world were chiding, Hath cheered me as a lovely beam A lonely spirit guiding.
An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the Beautiful.
I am come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.