A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

Villains!' I shrieked. 'Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.

Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.

If I venture to displace ... the microscopical speck of dust... on the point of my finger,... I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of multitudinous myriads of stars.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.