The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.

What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one's capacity to register?

Is it a fact -- or have I dreamt it -- that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.