“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.”

“Shadow! or Spirit!Whatever thou art,Which still doth inheritThe whole or a partOf the form of thy birth,Of the mould of thy clay,Which returned to the earth,Re-appear to the day!”

“When We Two PartedWhen we two partedIn silence and tears,Half broken-heartedTo sever for years,Pale grew thy cheek and cold,Colder thy kiss;Truly that hour foretoldSorrow to this.The dew of the morningSunk chill on my brow—It felt like the warningOf what I feel now.Thy vows are all broken,And light is thy fame:I hear thy name spoken,And share in its shame.They name thee before me,A knell to mine ear;A shudder comes o'er me—Why wert thou so dear?They know not I knew thee,Who knew thee too well:Long, long shall I rue thee,Too deeply to tell.In secret we met—In silence I grieve,That thy heart could forget,Thy spirit deceive.If I should meet theeAfter long years,How should I greet thee?With silence and tears.”

“They accuse me--Me--the present writer ofThe present poem--of--I know not what,--A tendency to under-rate and scoffAt human power and virtue, and all that;And this they say in language rather rough.Good God! I wonder what they would be at!I say no more than has been said in Dante'sVerse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes;By Swift, by Machiavel, by Rochefoucault;By Fenelon, by Luther and by Plato;By Tillotson, and Wesley, and Rousseau,Who knew this life was not worth a potato.'Tis not their fault, nor mine, if this be so--For my part, I pretend not to be Cato,Nor even Diogenes.--We live and die, But which is best, you know no more than I.”

“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.”

“Remember thee! remember thee! Till Lethe quench life's burning stream Remorse and shame shall cling to thee, And haunt thee like a feverish dream! Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not. Thy husband too shall think of thee: By neither shalt thou be forgot, Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!”

“‎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.”