Joshua

“I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“Unharmed with naked feet she trod
Upon the hot and burning stars”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Longfellow's Complete Poems: Illustrated

“Some alien substance more and more is cleaving
To all the mind conceives of grand and fair;
When this world's Good is won by our achieving,
The Better, then, is named a cheat and snare”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“My inclination to this led me so strongly against the will, nay, the commands, of my father, and against all the entreaties and persuasions of my mother and other friends, that there seemed to be something fatal in that propension of nature, tending directly to the life of misery which was to befall me.”
― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe