Date: August 31, 1837

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: March 1843

"The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: March 1843

"Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: March 1843

"It was the sad confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: March 1843

"My earthly senses are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the heart of a rose at sunset."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1845

"Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, / Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before."

— Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)

Date: 1845

"No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1845

"I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1845

"They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1942

"It has to be on that stage / And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and / With meditation, speak words that in the ear, / In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, / Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound / Of which, an invisible audience listens, / Not to the play, but to itself, ex...

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)