Marina

“You may see the disc of Divinity quite clearly through the smoked glass of humanity, but no otherwise.”
― Coventry Patmore

“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.”
― William Wordsworth

“In the elements themselves, of which all sub-elementary things are composed, there is no acquiescence, but a vicissitudinary transmutation into one another: air condensed becomes water, a more solid body, and air rarefied becomes fire, a body more disputable and inapparent. It is so in the condition of men, too: a merchant condensed, kneaded and packed up in a great estate, becomes a lord; and a merchant rarefied, blown up by a perfidious factor, or by a riotous son, evaporates into air, into nothing, and is not seen. And if there were anything permanent and durable in this world, yet we got nothing by it, because howsoever that it might last in itself, yet we could not last to enjoy it; if our goods were not amongst moveables, yet we ourselves are; if they could stay with us, yet we cannot stay with them.”
― John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne

“I think one is always in love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley