“But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.”

“I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all. ”

“‎Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, a boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence. Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality; and dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy. They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, they take a weight off our waking toils. They do divide our being; they become a portion of ourselves as of our time, and look like heralds of eternity. They pass like spirits of the past—they speak like sibyls of the future; they have power— the tyranny of pleasure and of pain. They make us what we were not—what they will, and shake us with the vision that’s gone by, the dread of vanished shadows—Are they so? Is not the past all shadow?—What are they? Creations of the mind?—The mind can make substances, and people planets of their own, with beings brighter than have been, and give a breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. I would recall a vision which I dreamed, perchance in sleep—for in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.”

“Nothing so difficult as a beginning In poesy, unless perhaps the end; For oftentimes when Pegasus seems winning The race, he sprains a wing, and down we tend, Like Lucifer when hurled from Heaven for sinning; Our sin the same, and hard as his to mend, Being Pride, which leads the mind to soar too far, Till our own weakness shows us what we are. But Time, which brings all beings to their level, And sharp Adversity, will teach at last Man,—and, as we would hope,—perhaps the Devil, That neither of their intellects are vast: While Youth's hot wishes in our red veins revel, We know not this—the blood flows on too fast; But as the torrent widens towards the Ocean, We ponder deeply on each past emotion.”

“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so feltIn solitude, where we are least alone.”

“Tis to create, and in creating live        A being more intense, that we endow        With form our fancy, gaining as we give        The life we image, even as I do now.        What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,        Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,        Invisible but gazing, as I glow        Mix'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth.”

“In quiet we had learn'd to dwell-Myvery chains and I grew friends,So much a long communion tends-To make us what we are:-even IRegain'd my freedom with a sigh.”