Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
Yet mad I am not…and very surely do I not dream.
To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.