“I went as a passenger, having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend”

“I have not always been as now:The fever'd diadem on my brow I claim'd and won unsurprisingly-Hath not the same fierce heirdom given Rome to the Caeser-this is me? The heritage of a kindly mind,And a proud spirit which hath striven Triumphantly with human kind.”

“It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.”

“True! - nervous - very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”

“I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.”

“There are things around us and about, of which I can render no distinct account--Things material and spiritual; heaviness in the atmosphere; a sense of suffocation, anxiety, and above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant.”

“There are surely other worlds than this - other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude - other speculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies?”