The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a “ruined man” is itself a vocation.
As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.
Bells, the poor man’s only music.
Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.
The first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers.
Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.
Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it.
Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love.
Until my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns.
Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy.
Why look’st thou so?‘ – With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS.
When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry, I find.
A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child.
But I do not doubt that it is beneficial sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a grander and better world; for if the mind grows used to the trivia of daily life, it may dwindle too much and decline altogether into worthless thoughts.
Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving.
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us He made and loveth all. The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest Turned from the bridegroom’s door.
It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse that distinguishes in order to divide.
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
A new Earth and new Heaven.
Every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity.
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely ’twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.