The Only Happy Author In This World

Some Minds Corrode And Grow Inactive Under The Loss Of Personal Liberty; Others Grow Morbid And Irritable; But It Is The Nature Of The Poet To Become Tender And Imaginitive In The Loneliness Of Confinement. He Banquets Upon The Honey Of His Own Thoughts, And, Like The Captive Bird, Pours Forth His Soul In Melody.

It Is Not Poverty So Much As Pretense That Harasses A Ruined Man.

There Is A Remembrance Of The Dead To Which We Turn Even From The Charms Of The Living.

All These, However, Were Mere Terrors Of The Night, Phantoms Of The Mind That Walk In Darkness; And Though He Had Seen Many Spectres In His Time, And Been More Than Once Beset By Satan In Divers Shapes, In His Lonely Pre-ambulations, Yet Daylight Put An End To All These Evils; And He Would Have Passed A Pleasent Life Of It, In Despite Of The Devil And All His Works, If His Path Had Not Been Crossed By A Being That Causes More Perplexity To Mortal Man Than Ghosts, Goblins, And The Whole Race Of Witches Put Together, And That Was - A Woman.

Sometimes He Spent Hours Together In The Great Libraries Of Paris, Those Catacombs Of Departed Authors, Rummaging Among Their Hoards Of Dusty And Obsolete Works In Quest Of Food For His Unhealthy Appetite. He Was, In A Manner, A Literary Ghoul, Feeding In The Charnel-house Of Decayed Literature.