Anima Poetæ

This evening there was the most perfect and the brightest halo circling the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was the halo, so compact, so entire a circle, th...

This evening, and indeed all this day, I ought to have been reading and filling the margins of Malthus. ["An Essay on the Principles of Population, &c., London," 1803, 4to. The...

Where'er I find the Good, the True, the Fair, I ask no names--God's spirit dwelleth there! The unconfounded, undivided Three, Each for itself, and all in each, to see In man and...

We may think of time as threefold. Slowly comes the Future, swift the Present passes by, but the Past is unmoveable. No impatience will quicken the loiterer, no terror, no delig...

O dare I accuse My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen, Or call my destiny niggard! O no! no! It is her largeness, and her overflow, Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!

Yea, oft alone, Piercing the long-neglected holy cave The haunt obscure of old Philosophy, He bade with lifted torch its starry walls Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame...

The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or ornaments, or _playwiths_, but...

How marked the contrast between troubled manhood, and joyously-active youth in the sense of time! To the former, time like the sun in an empty sky is never seen to move, but onl...

I had a confused shadow rather than an image in my recollection, like that from a thin cloud, as if the idea were descending, though still in some measureless height.

"We should judge of absent things by the absent. Objects which are present are apt to produce perceptions too strong to be impartially compared with those recalled only by the m...

Observed the great half moon setting behind the mountain ridge, and watched the shapes its various segments presented as it slowly sunk--first the foot of a boot, all but the he...