“There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if the flash might pass through them,— but the fire must come down from heaven. Ah! but what if the stormy nimbus of youthful passion has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged cirrus of dissolving aspirations, or the silvered cumulus of sluggish satiety? I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom living ones no longer worship,—the immortal maid, who, name her what you will,—Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty,—sits by the pillow of every youthful poet and bends over his pail forehead until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his dreams.”

-Oliver Wendell Holmes