Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured,
Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell—
We, who have sung the praises of the lord
With every fiber in us, every cell.

Dear Gary,
Somehow your letter was no surprise (and I think you knew that it was no surprise or you would have tried to break the news more gently); somehow I think we understand what the other is going to say long before we say it—a proof of love and, I think, a protection against misunderstanding. So I've been expecting this letter for five weeks now—and I still don't know how to answer it.
Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you—Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price I paid, the oath I signed to write poetry.
I think that someday you'll enter Bohemia—not for me (I'm not worth the price, no human being is), but for poetry—to see the windows and maybe blast a few yourself through the rocks of hell. I'll be there waiting for you, my arms open to receive you.

Wordsworth At Dove Cottage

© Alfred Austin

Wise Wordsworth, to avert your ken,

From half of human fate.

Beside The Idle Summer Sea

© William Ernest Henley

Beside the idle summer sea,
And in the vacant summer days,
Light Love came fluting down the ways,
Where you were loitering with me.

The American Soldier

A Picture from the Life
To serve with love,
And shed your blood,
Approved may be above,

In The Valley Of Cautertz

All along the valley, stream that flashest white,

Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night,

Love is the Water of Life

Everything other than love for the most beautiful God
though it be sugar- eating.
What is agony of the spirit?
To advance toward death without seizing
hold of the Water of Life.

To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth

Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,

Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:

A Wreath Of Sonnets (4/14)

These tear-stained flowers of a poet's mind,
Culled from my bosom, lay it wholly bare;
My heart's a garden: Love is sowing there
Sad elegies each with my longing signed.