Date: April 26 1870

"The cloud's not danced out of my brain,— / The cloud that made it turn and swim / While hour by hour the books grew dim."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"Let the thoughts pass, an empty cloud!"

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"Why, as a volume seldom read / Being opened halfway shuts again, / So might the pages of her brain / Be parted at such words, and thence / Close back upon the dusty sense."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"For is there hue or shape defin'd / In Jenny's desecrated mind, / Where all contagious currents meet, / A Lethe of the middle street?"

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"Enough to throw one's thoughts in heaps / Of doubt and horror,—what to say / Or think,—this awful secret sway, / The potter's power over the clay!"

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"Like a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look, / For its base pages claim control / To crush the flower within the soul."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"You'd not believe by what strange roads / Thought travels, when your beauty goads / A man to-night to think of toads."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"Between the threads fine fumes arise / And shape their pictures in the brain."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: 1872

"No! the celestial Author and Creator / In those two volumes of the Book of Nature / Ordained for our instruction, represents, / By multiform but single elements, / One universe of sense, all that we know, / The visible world of instantaneous show / And tangible creation, hard and slow,The last r...

— Frere, John Hookham (1769-1846)

Date: 1872

"At Shakespear's happy birth / With fire ethereal Jove his soul endow'd, / Then bade him spurn the narrow bounds of earth, / And sordid wishes of the grov'ling crowd, / That chain the free-born mind."

— Laurence, French (1757-1809)