With Me Poetry Has Not Been A

I Am Excessively Slothful, And Wonderfully Industrious-by Fits. There Are Epochs When Any Kind Of Mental Exercise Is Torture, And When Nothing Yields Me Pleasure But The Solitary Communion With The 'mountains & The Woods'-the 'altars' Of Byron. I Have Thus Rambled And Dreamed Away Whole Months, And Awake, At Last, To A Sort Of Mania For Composition. Then I Scribble All Day, And Read All Night, So Long As The Disease Endures.

You Call It Hope-that Fire Of Fire! It Is But Agony Of Desire.

The Most Natural, And, Consequently, The Truest And Most Intense Of The Human Affections Are Those Which Arise In The Heart As If By Electric Sympathy.

And Darkness And Decay And The Red Death Held Illimitable Dominion Over All.

One Half Of The Pleasure Experienced At A Theatre Arises From The Spectator's Sympathy With The Rest Of The Audience, And, Especially From His Belief In Their Sympathy With Him.