What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.
And angling too, that solitary vice, What Izaak Walton sings or says: The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.
Our life is two fold Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality.
Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!
Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime? Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime!
I live, but live to die: and, living, see nothing to make death hateful, save an innate clinging, a loathsome and yet all invincible instinct of life, which I abhor, as I despise myself,
yet cannot overcome — and so I live. Would I had never lived!