Edgar Allan Poe

My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.

In no affairs of mere prejudice, pro or con, do we deduce inferences with entire certainty, even from the most simple data.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

I now feel it impossible to realize the full extent of the misery which I endured.

In this boat we were in the habit of going on some of the maddest freaks in the world.

And when, amid no earthly moans, Down, down that town shall settle hence, Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, Shall do it reverence.

So blend the turrets and shadows there That all seem pendulous in air, While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down.

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest.

When I think of the long twenty-one years that I have called you father, and you have called me son, I cry like a child to think that it should all end in this.

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.

I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no …

As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester — and this is my last jest.

Hear the mellow wedding bells Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight!

Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells.

Thank Heaven! the crisis — The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last — And the fever called "Living" Is conquered at last.

O God! Can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?

You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone?

"Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride," The shade replied, — "If you seek for Eldorado!"

Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado.

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

Can it be fancied that Deity ever vindictively Made in his image a mannikin merely to madden it?

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

For the love of God Montresor!

Thou wouldst be loved? — then let thy heart From its present pathway part not! Being everything which now thou art, Be nothing which thou art not. So with the world thy gentle ways, Thy grace, thy more than beauty,