Sublime

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone. — Rudyard Kipling

Et il allait, silencieux, le long du rivage de la mer aux bruits sans nombre.

Henry Scott Holland’s “Facts of Faith”: “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I’ve only slipped away into the next room… Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere, very near, just around the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt. Nothing is lost. One brief moment, and all will be a

Jack Gilbert addresses this experience directly in “A Brief for the Defense”: “If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,” he writes, “we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.”

“You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protec

But I shall follow the endless, winding way,—the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.

At the advent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into

It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever—that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard.