“Check out that one at the end. He's taken the form of a footstool. Weird… but somehow I like his style."

"That is a footstool.”

First manuscript version (19 November 1861).
The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 283.

Poems (1869), A Strip of Blue (1870)
Context: Here sit I, as a little child;
The threshold of God's door
Is that clear band of chrysoprase;
Now the vast temple floor,
The blinding glory of the dome
I bow my head before.
Thy universe, O God, is home,
In height or depth, to me;
Yet here upon thy footstool green
Content am I to be;
Glad when is oped unto my need
Some sea-like glimpse of Thee.

Source: The Smart Set (October 1919), p. 139
Context: The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity.

“'Google was Not a Normal Place': Brin, Page, and Mayer on the Accidental Birth of the Company That Changed Everything” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-excerpt-google, in Vanity Fair (10 July 2018).

"The Essential Ellison", interview by Ishmael Reed in Y'Bird 1, no. 1 (1978): 130-59.

Song lyrics, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Motorpsycho Nightmare

Source: The Outline of History (1920), Ch. 41