How dull! to hear the voice of those Whom Rank or Chance, whom Wealth or Power, Have made, though neither friends nor foes, Associates of the festive… - Lord Byron

‎Our life is twofold; 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; and dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy. They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, they take a weight off our waking toils. They do divide our being; they become a portion of ourselves as of our time, and look like heralds of eternity. They pass like spirits of the past — they speak like sibyls of the future; they have power — the tyranny of pleasure and of pain. They make us what we were not — what they will, and shake us with the vision that’s gone by, the dread of vanished shadows — Are they so? Is not the past all shadow? — What are they? Creations of the mind? — The mind can make substances, and people planets of their own, with beings brighter than have been, and give a breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. I would recall a vision which I dreamed, perchance in sleep — for in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.

Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine — A sad, sour, sober beverage — by time
Is sharpen’d from its high celestial flavour
Down to a very homely household savour.

Perfect she was, but as perfection is
Insipid in this naughty world of ours,