as fine names as it would carry, and to draw advantage from it. ‘Attica,’ she said to a friend, ‘is your province, Thessaly is mine: Attica produced the marble wonders of the great geniuses; but Thessaly is the land of magic.’
‘I have a great share of Typhon to the Osiris, wild
rush and leap, blind force for the sake of force.’
‘Dante, thou didst not describe, in all thy apartments
of Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence
half unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to be
born.’
‘Every year I live, I dislike routine more and more,
though I see that society rests on that, and other
falsehoods. The more I screw myself down to hours, the
more I become expert at giving out thought and life
in regulated rations, — the more I weary of this world,
and long to move upon the wing, without props and
sedan chairs.’
TO R. W. E.
‘Dec. 26, 1839. — If you could look into my mind just now, you would send far from you those who love and hate. I am on the Drachenfels, and cannot get off; it is one of my naughtiest moods. Last Sunday, I wrote a long letter, describing it in prose and verse, and I had twenty minds to send it you as a literary curiosity; then I thought, this might destroy relations, and I might not be able to be calm and chip marble with you any more, if I talked to you in magnetism and music; so I sealed and sent it in the due direction.