Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race; they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass - Percy Bysshe Shelley

By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system.

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

I have sent books and music there, and all / Those instruments with which high spirits call / The future from its cradle, and the past / Out of its grave, and make the present last / In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, / Folded within their own eternity.