Date: March 17, 1852

"I make the truest observations and distinctions then, when the will is yet wholly asleep and the mind works like a machine without friction."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1852

"Give me thy hand, and hush awhile, / And turn those limpid eyes on mine, / And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul."

— Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)

Date: 1852

"Alas! is even love too weak / To unlock the heart, and let it speak?"

— Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)

Date: 1852

"Ah! well for us, if even we, / Even for a moment, can get free / Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd; / For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd!"

— Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)

Date: 1852

"Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, / From the soul's subterranean depth upborne / As from an infinitely distant land, / Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey / A melancholy into all our day."

— Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)

Date: 1852

"A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, / And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again."

— Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)

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: November and December 1853, 1856

"To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience."

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1854

"Let it [caelestïal Sweetness] not stop when entred at the Ear / But sink, and take deep rooting in my heart."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1854

A priest can "secretly impress / On the soft wax of Woman's yielded mind / Each vile impression, which a Jesuit loves"

— Montgomery, Robert (1807-1855)