I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?

If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.

True! - nervous - very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

The past is a pebble in my shoe.