O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
  The brightest heaven of invention!
King Henry V., Chorus.  SHAKESPEARE.

    Hark, his hands the lyre explore! 
  Bright eyed Fancy, hovering o’er,
  Scatters from her pictured urn
  Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.
Progress of Poesy.  T. GRAY.

  One of those passing rainbow dreams
  Half light, half shade, which Fancy’s beams
  Paint on the fleeting mists that roll,
  In trance or slumber, round the soul.
Lalla Rookh.  T. MOORE.

    Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,
    And fevers into false creation:—­where,
    Where are the forms the sculptor’s soul hath seized? 
    In him alone.  Can Nature show so fair? 
    Where are the charms and virtues which we dare
    Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,
    The unreached Paradise of our despair,
    Which o’er-informs the pencil and the pen,
  And overpowers the page where it would bloom again?
Childe Harold, Canto IV.  LORD BYRON.

                   We figure to ourselves
  The thing we like, and then we build it up
  As chance will have it, on the rock or sand;
  For thought is tired of wandering o’er the world,
  And home-bound Fancy runs her bark ashore.
Philip Van Artevelde, Pt.  I, Act i.  Sc. 5.  SIR H. TAYLOR.

HAMLET.  My father,—­methinks I see my father. 
HORATIO.  Oh! where, my lord? 
HAMLET.  In my mind’s eye, Horatio.
Hamlet, Act i.  Sc. 2.  SHAKESPEARE.

  Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn
  Indicative that suns go down;
  The notice to the startled grass
  That darkness is about to pass.
Poems.  E. DICKINSON.

IMMORTALITY.

  To be no more—­sad cure; for who would lose,
  Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
  Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
  To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
  In the wide womb of uncreated night,
  Devoid of sense and motion?
Paradise Lost, Bk.  II.  MILTON.

  Death is delightful.  Death is dawn,
  The waking from a weary night
  Of fevers unto truth and light.
Even So.  J. MILLER.

No, no!  The energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun;
And he who flagged not in the earthly strife,
From strength to strength advancing—­only he,
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.
Immortality.  M. ARNOLD.

                       God keeps a niche
  In Heaven, to hold our idols; and albeit
  He brake them to our faces, and denied
  That our close kisses should impair their white,—­
  I know we shall behold them raised, complete,
  The dust swept from their beauty, glorified,
  New Memnons singing in the great God-light.
Futurity with the Departed.  E.B.  BROWNING.