The Happiest of the Poets in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“He may not have been, indeed he was not, among the very greatest of the poets, but he was among the greatest of those who prepare the last reconciliation when the Cross shall blossom with roses.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “I mean there was one buffet supper, but there was nobody moving around saying come on I want you to meet the Nobel prize winner or taking the Nobel prize winner and saying come on I want you to meet Albert Hoffmann. It didn’t seem to me that there was any attempt to cross these groups. So they were like strange weirdos and Austrian bureaucrats and never these groups came in contact with each other.”
  2. “It is as though the last judgment had already begun in his mind and that the essences and powers, which the divine hand had mixed into one another to make the loam of life, fell asunder at his touch.”
  3. “The desire seems not other than the desire of the bird for its mate in the heart of the wood, and we listen to that joyous praise as though a bird watching its plumage in still water had begun to sing in its joy, or as if we heard hawk praising hawk in the middle air, and because it is the praise of one made for all noble life and not for pleasure only, it seems, though it is the praise of the body, that it is the noblest praise.”
  4. “Great was the deftness of thine imaginer, and he would have all folk who see thee wonder at thy deep thinking and thy carefulness and thy kindness.”
  5. “I am certain that he understood thoroughly, as all artists understand a little, that the important things, the things we must believe in or perish, are beyond argument. We can no more reason about them than can the pigeon, come but lately from the egg, about the hawk whose shadow makes it cower among the grass.”