Samuel Taylor Coleridge

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew in its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

With unclosed lids, already had i dreamt of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang from morn to evening, all the hot fair-day, so sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me with a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear most like articulate sounds of things to come! So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!

Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew.

With walls and towers were girdled round.

You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose.

With what deep worship I have still adored.

You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body and mind. Partly from ill-health, and partly from an unhealthy and reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, and (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, and feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion and action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming and therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-incaged, and always in the Moult, and my whole Note is, Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Without a breeze, without a tide, She steadies with upright keel.

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.

Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it -- low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion -- and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.

Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve.

You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8 d. to 6 d. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it, after all.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Your Sensibilities are tempestuous ? you feel Indignation at Weakness ? Now Indignation is the handsome Brother of Anger and Hatred ? His looks are lovely in terror ? yet still remember, who are his Relations.

Would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?

Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots.

Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds! Ye signs and wonders of the element! Utter forth ' God,' and fill the hills with praise!

Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

Ye signs and wonders of the element!

Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.

Yea! everything that is and will be free!

With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.