“Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom”

“Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.”

“It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendours beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise.”

“The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, & which life reveals is the most living proof of our immortality.”

“Fruit free of any bruises, not yet broken open, / With flesh so firm and smooth, it cried out to be eaten!”

“The Poet is a kinsman in the cloudsWho scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.”

“Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage, Traversé çà et là par de brillants de soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.”