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The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone-- Portent or promise--and gives way To pale, meek Dawn.

Herman Melville

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Herman Melville
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: August 1
Died: 1891
Died: September 28
Art Collector
Essayist
Lecturer
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Sailor
Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Hermann Melville
Herman Melvill
Way
Host
Portent
Dawn
Portents
Terror
Phantom
Promise
Meek
Gives
Phantoms
Quite
Splendor
Gone
Faded
Giving
Pale

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God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
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Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.
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Dollars damn me and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
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contempt is as frequently produced at first sight as love.
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.
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Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself but is an errand-boy in heaven nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power how then can this one small heart beat this one small brain think thoughts unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.
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Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.
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I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
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The entire merit of a man can never be made known nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.
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For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .
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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
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I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling--no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content--that is it and irresponsibility but without licentious inclination.
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Let us only hate hatred and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn.
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In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.
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Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows.
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I would prefer not to.
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It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.
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Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.
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Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world deaf to its voice and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us.
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