I kneel, an altered and an humble man, Amid thy shadows, and so drink within My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory!
For many miles on either side of the river’s oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads.
The giant will succumbed to a power more stern.
All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel – although he neither saw nor heard – to feel the presence of my head within the room.
Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.
I could not love except where Death Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath.
The wine sparkled in his eyes.
If Pierre Bon-Bon had his failings – and what great man has not a thousand? – if Pierre Bon-Bon, I say, had his failings, they were failings of very little importance – faults indeed which, in other tempers, have often been looked upon rather in the light of virtues.
In a night such as is this to me, a man lives-lives a whole century of life-nor would I forgo this rapturous delight for that of a whole century of ordinary existence.
The convex surface of any segment of a sphere is, to the entire surface of the sphere itself, as the versed sine of the segment to the diameter of the sphere.
The mountainous surges suggest the idea of innumerable dumb gigantic fiends struggling in impotent agony.
Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!
Some human memories and tearful lore, Render him terrorless: his name’s “No More.
With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.
There was not a sous-cusinier in Rouen, who could not have told you that Bon-Bon was a man of genius. His very cat knew it, and forebore to whisk her tail in the presence of the man of genius.
Art was, for Poe, the only method by which one could penetrate the shapeless empirical world in the search for order, and.
Man could not both know and succumb. Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease.
One night as I sat, half stupefied, in a den of more than infamy, my attention.
Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion.
And again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions “Who is he? – whence came he? – and what are his objects?” But no answer was there found.