More hearts are breaking in this world of ours Than one would say. In distant villages And solitudes remote, where winds have wafted The barbed seeds of love, or birds of passage Scattered them in their flight, do they take root, And grow in silence, and in silence perish.
The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.
Write on your doors the saying wise and old,
"Be bold! be bold!" and everywhere - "Be bold;
Be not too bold!" Yet better the excess
Than the defect; better the more than less;
Better like Hector in the field to die,
Than like a perfumed Paris turn and fly.
The course of my long life hath reached at last in fragile bark over a tempestuous sea the common harbor, where must rendered be account for all the actions of the past.