[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent hall…

The stormy March has come at last, With winds and clouds and changing skies; I hear the rushing of the blast That through the snowy valley flies.

All that tread, The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom.

If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Godel believes Leibnitz to have perfected…

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later I, nor anyone else…