Shall I compare man to a clockwork Catamaran, destined to float on in a meaner element for so many moments or hours, and then to explode, scattering its _involucrum_ and itself to ascend into its proper element?
I am persuaded that we love what is above us more than what is under us.
Money--paper money--peace, war. How comes it that all men in all companies are talking of the depreciation, etc. etc.--and yet that a discourse on transubstantiation would not be a more withering sirocco than the attempt to explain philosophically the true cure and causes of that which interests all so vehemently?
All convalescence is a resurrection, a palingenesy of our youth--"and loves the earth and all that live thereon with a new heart." But oh! the anguish to have the aching freshness of yearning and no answering object--only remembrances of faithless change--and unmerited alienation!
The sun at evening holds up her fingers of both hands before her face that mortals may have one steady gaze--her transparent crimson fingers as when a lovely woman looks at the fire through her slender palms.
O that perilous moment [for such there is] of a half-reconciliation, when the coldness and the resentment have been sustained too long. Each is drawing toward the other, but like glass in the mid-state between fusion and compaction a single sand will splinter it.
Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beautiful object or landscape, it seems as if I were on the _brink_ of a fruition still denied--as if Vision were an _appetite_; even as a man would feel who, having put forth all his muscular strength in an act of prosilience, is at the very moment _held back_--he leaps and yet moves not from his place.
Philosophy in general, but a plummet to so short a line that it can sound no deeper than the sounder's eyes can reach--and yet--in certain waters it may teach the exact depth and prevent a drowning.
The midnight wild beasts staring at the hunter's torch, or when the hunter sees the tiger's eye glaring on the red light of his own torch.
A summer-sailing on a still peninsulating river, and sweet as the delays of parting lovers.
Sir F[rancis] B[urdett], like a Lapland witch drowned in a storm of her own raising. Mr. Cobbett, who, for a dollar, can raise what, offer him ten thousand dollars, he could not allay.