“A sight to dream of, not to tell!”

“What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in you hand Ah, what then?”

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye! and what then?”

“Ere I was old? Ah woeful Ere,Which tells me, Youth's no longer here!O Youth! for years so many and sweet,'Tis known that Thou and I were one,I'll think it but a fond conceit--It cannot be that Thou art gone!”

“You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow.”

“Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rangFrom morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted meWith a wild pleasure, falling on mine earMost like articulate sounds of things to come!So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!And so I brooded all the following morn,Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eyeFixed with mock study on my swimming book.”

“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”