Date: 1851

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it...

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: Date Unknown

It is difficult for a "powerful mind" to be its own master: "a lake wants mountains to compass and hold it in."

— Addison, Joseph (1672-1719)

Date: 1854

"It was not the touch he needed most at such a moment--the touch that could calm the wild waters of his soul, as the uplifted hand of the sublimest love and patience could abate the raging of the sea--yet it was a woman's hand too."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"Her remembrances of home and childhood, were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many tho...

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1855

"This is the tasteless water of souls .... this the true sustenance."

— Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)

Date: 1855, 1856

"'Ah, my dear Don Amasa,' Don Benito once said, 'at those very times when you thought me so morose and ungrateful--nay when, as you now admit, you half thought me plotting your murder--at those very times my heart was frozen; I could not look at you, thinking of what, both on board this ship and ...

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1868

"And images, that, in the musing mind, / As in a placid lake, lie mirrored and defined, / If ruffling winds along the surface stray, / Scatter'd and broken, pass like rack away"

— Lyte, Henry Francis (1793-1847)

Date: 1868

"Over me the billows roll, / Swallow up my sinking soul."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1869

"His mind resembled chiefly the rugged and outstanding mountain, and yet it had characteristics which reminded you likewise of the gentle stream, flowing sweetly through the valley below."

— Sprague, William Buell (1795-1876)