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: 1871

"Tis prudent to correct mens mistakes without altering their language. This makes truth glide into their souls insensibly."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1871

"[T]he mynd of man first of hyt selfe ys a clene and pure tabul where ys no thyng payntyd or carvyd, but of hyt selfe apt & indyfferent to receyve al maner of pycturys, and image."

— Starkey, Thomas (c. 1495-1538)