Fear not that tyrants shall rule for ever, / Or the priests of the bloody faith; / They stand on the brink of that mighty river / Whose waves they have tainted with death.
How wonderful is Death, / Death and his brother Sleep! / One, pale as yonder waning moon, / With lips of lurid blue; / The other, rosy as the morn, / When, throned on ocean’s wave, / It blushes o’er the world: / Yet both so passing wonderful.
Power, like a desolating pestilence, / Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience, / Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, / Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame a mechanized automaton.
Religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude…. How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image, should she look into the mirror of Nature!
Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
We look before and after, / And pine for what is not; / E’en our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught; / Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought.
Worse than despair, / Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope: / It is the only ill which can find place / Upon the giddy, sharp, and narrow hour / Tottering beneath us.
