''He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back.... I must not dwell upon the fearful repast.... Words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality.''
''Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse—elementary.''
''Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado.''
''In the misty mid region of Weir—''
''The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?''
''And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams— In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams.''
''Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow''
''There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.''
''In Heaven a spirit doth dwell "Whose heart-strings are a lute;" None sing so wildly well As the angel Israfel, And the giddy stars (so legends tell) Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice, all mute.''
''After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.''
''In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace— Radiant palace—reared its head. In the monarch Thought's dominion, It stood there!''
''In writing these Tales ... at long intervals, I have kept the book-unity always in mind ... with reference to its effect as part of a whole.''
''When the light was extinguished, She covered me warm, And she prayed to the angels To keep me from harm—''
''The usual derivation of the word Metaphysics is not to be sustained ... the science is supposed to take its name from its superiority to physics. The truth is, that Aristotle's treatise on Morals is next in succession to his Book of Physics.''
''"Over the mountains Of the moon, Down the valley of the shadow, Ride, boldly ride," The shade replied,— "If you seek for Eldorado!"''
''The death ... of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.''
''As an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy ... a limitless succession of Universes.... Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God.''
''That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.''
''There the traveler meets, aghast, Sheeted memories of the past— Shrouded forms that start and sigh As they pass the wanderer by— White-robed forms of friends long given, In agony, to the earth—and heaven.''
''And so all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the side of the sea.''
''A lunatic may be "soothed,"... for a time, but in the end, he is very apt to become obstreperous. His cunning, too, is proverbial, and great.... When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.''
''Observing him in these moods, I often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the fancy of a double Dupin—the creative and the resolvent.''
''In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.''
''Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?''
''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 soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist."''
''We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery—by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press—their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.''
''He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who ... shall ... persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.''
''"Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise. "But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days! "Let no bell toll!—lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth, "Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth. "To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven— "From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven— "From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven."''
''Science! true daughter of old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee—or how deem thee wise Who woulds't not leave him in his wandering,''
''Taught me my alphabet to say, To lisp my very earliest word,''
''Thou wast all that to me, love, For which my soul did pine:''
''"We should have to be God ourselves!"MWith a phrase so startling as this yet ringing in my ears, I nevertheless venture to demand if this our present ignorance of the Deity is an ignorance to which the soul is everlastingly condemned.''
''While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy "Man", And its hero the Conqueror Worm.''
''The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.''
''the wind came out of the cloud chilling And killing my Annabel Lee.''
''We have ... a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man.... It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us—but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above.''
''In the one instance, the dreamer ... loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions ... until ... he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings,... forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance.''
''This wild star—it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes,... I spoke it ... into birth.''
''like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh—but smile no more.''
''During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity. I had indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure when I found one in the death of my wife.''
''Thank Heaven! the crisis — The danger, is past, And the lingering illness, Is over at last M, And the fever called "Living" Is conquered at last.''
''All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.''
''The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely- discernible fissure,... extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened.''
''I exacted the most sacred oaths, that under no circumstances they would bury me until decomposition had so materially advanced as to render farther preservation impossible. And, even then, my mortal terrors would listen to no reason—would accept no consolation. I entered into a series of elaborate precautions.''
''Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.''
''I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand— How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep—while I weep!''
''Think ... before the words—the vows are spoken, which put yet another terrible bar between us.... I call upon you in the name of God ... to be sincere with me—Can you, my Annie, bear to think I am another's?''
''Believe me, there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard.''
''And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!''
''In spite of the air of fable ... the public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.''
''As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of "dead! dead!" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once ... crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands.''
''Some sepulcher, remote, alone, Against whose portal she hath thrown, In childhood, many an idle stone— Some tomb from out whose sounding door She ne'er shall force an echo more, Thrilling to think, poor child of sin! It was the dead who groaned within.''
''What I here propound is true: ... if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will "rise again to ... Life Everlasting."''
''Tell a scoundrel, three or four times a day, that he is the pink of probity, and you make him at least the perfection of "respectability" in good earnest. On the other hand, accuse an honorable man, too petinaciously, of being a villain, and you fill him with a perverse ambition to show you that you are not altogether in the wrong.''
''Mournful and never-ending remembrance.''
''Nor had I erred in my calculations—nor had I endured in vain. I at length felt that I was free.''
''I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love which was more than love -- I and my Annabel Lee.''
''Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow;Mvainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—''
''On desperate seas long wont to roam, The hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.''
''Yes, Heaven is thine; but this Is a world of sweets and sours; Our flowers are merely—flowers, And the shadow of thy perfect bliss Is the sunshine of ours.''
''"As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester—and this is my last jest."... The Work of vengeance was complete.''
''Semi-Saracenic architecture, sustaining itself as if by miracle in mid air; glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, and pinnacles; and seeming the phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the Sylphs,... the Fairies,... the Genii, and ... the Gnomes.''
''You need not attempt to shake off or to banter off Romance. It is an evil you will never get rid of to the end of your days. It is a part of yourself ... of your soul. Age will only mellow it a little, and give it a holier tone.''
''No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so minute a description.... But, then, the radicalness of these differences ... these things ... were strongly corroborative of suspicion.''
''By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an eidolon, named Night, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule— From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of space—out of time.''
''As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.''
''To be thoroughly conversant with a Man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.''
''Romance, who loves to nod and sing, With drowsy head and folded wing,''
''The unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.''
''The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive.''
''a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky.''
''Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.''
''And we passed to the end of a vista, But were stopped by the door of a tomb— By the door of a legended tomb; And I said—" What is written, sweet sister, On the door of this legended tomb?" She replied—"Ulalume—Ulalume!— 'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"''
''The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.''
''If I venture to displace ... the microscopical speck of dust... on the point of my finger,... I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of multitudinous myriads of stars.''
''Barnaby, the idiot, is the murderer's own son.''
''I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age—I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science.''
''There is ... a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language.... Now, so entire is my faith in the power of words, that at times, I have believed it possible to embody even the evanescence of fancies such as I have attempted to describe.''
''There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.''
''The waves have now a redder glow— The hours are breathing faint and low— And when, amid no earthly moans, Down, down that town shall settle hence, Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, Shall do it reverence.''
''Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.''
''The next work of Carlyle will be entitled "Bow-Wow," and the title-page will have a motto from the opening chapter of the Koran: "There is no error in this Book."''
''It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.''
''But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate;''
''What can be more soothing, at once to a man's Pride, and to his Conscience, than the conviction that, in taking vengeance on his enemies for injustice done him, he has simply to do them justice in return?''
''Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore,''
''There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny, and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth.''
''If the propositions of this Discourse are tenable, the "state of progressive collapse" is precisely that state in which alone we are warranted in considering All Things.''
''The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure ...: buffoons,... improvisatori,... ballet-dancers,... musicians,... Beauty,... wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death."''
''For the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.''
''She was a child and I was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee— With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.''
''TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?''
''It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.''
''Far in the forest, dim and old, For her may some tall vault unfold—''
''In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.''
''"There is no exquisite beauty," says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, "without some strangeness in the proportion."''
''You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou ... dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou has murdered thyself.''
''The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep, Which is enduring, so be deep! Heaven have her in its sacred keep!''
''But see, amid the mimic rout A crawling shape intrude!''
''The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood.... For the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.''
''I have proceeded ... to prevent the lapse from ... the point of blending between wakefulness and sleep.... Not ... that I can render the point more than a point—but that I can startle myself ... into wakefulness—and thus transfer the point ... into the realm of Memory—convey its impressions,... to a situation where ... I can survey them with the eye of analysis.''
''Hear the sledges with the bells— Silver bells!''
''If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—"My Heart Laid Bare." But—this little book must be true to its title.''
''To see distinctly the machinery—the wheels and pinions—of any work of Art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist.''
''"Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."''
''The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.''
''The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued.''
''In the tale proper—where there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident—mere construction is, of course, far more imperatively demanded than in the novel.''
''Of late, eternal Condor years So shake the very Heaven on high With tumult as they thunder by, I have no time for idle cares Through gazing on the unquiet sky.''
''To revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment.... All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—"My Heart Laid Bare." But—this little book must be true to its title.''
''Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good.''
''A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this—that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made—not to understand—but to feel—as crime.''
''As a viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass..., I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance ... that I was seized with a violent tremour.''
''Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors ... on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.''
''If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.''
''My love—my faith—should instil into your bosom a praeternatural calm. You would rest from care.... You would get better.... And if not, Helen,... if you died—then at least would I clasp your dear hand in death, and willingly—oh, joyfully ... go down with you into the night of the Grave.''
''Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the naiad from her flood, The elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?''
''Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more! See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!''
''Imperceptibly the love of these dischords grew upon me as my love of music grew stronger.''
''Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.''
''Resignedly beneath the sky The melancholy waters lie. So blend the turrets and shadows there That all seem pendulous in air, While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down.''
''It glows with the light Of the love of my Annie— With the thought of the light Of the eyes of my Annie.''
''The skies they were ashen and sober;''
''I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.''
''There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous—secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will—we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books ... we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.''
''The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.''
''I have no faith in human perfectability. 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.''
''"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore— Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."''
''While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells,''
''It is the curse of a certain order of mind, that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.''
''To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.''
''It was night, in the lonesome October''
''How much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.''
''I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.''
''Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest.''
''I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.''
''The painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought;... he grew tremulous and ... crying with a loud voice, "This is indeed Life itself!" turned suddenly to regard his beloved:MShe was dead!''
''The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.''