“Father remembered the wild pigeons crowding
Beech groves, mast-rich. The flutter in boughs, the cloud
Darkening all, a hurricane circling and surging.
Eye lost count, ear could not measure sound.
Mind hurled measureless with them, feathered the sky.”

Source: American Psycho

Source: 1910's, The Art of Noise', 1913, p. 6

I. 31 as quoted by Edwin Arthur Burtt in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia, ed. Christian Frisch (1858)
Context: Just as the eye was made to see colours, and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand, not whatever you please, but quantity.

Spellbound (November 1837)

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Stanza 1.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww260.html (1804)
Source: I Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud

Ode to Rae Wilson; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century

the washed-out, almost invisible blue of a hot, summer noon; the soft robin's egg, sometimes almost greenish blue of a late springtime evening, the darker, almost violet blue of fall. I have become a connoisseur of the coloring that the leaves take on in autumn and I know all the voices and the moods of the woods and river valley. I have, in a measure, entered into communion with nature, and in this wise have followed in the footsteps of Red Cloud and his people, although I am sure that their understanding and their emotions are more fine-tuned than mine are. I have seen, however, the roll of seasons, the birth and death of leaves, the glitter of the stars on more nights than I can number and from all this as from nothing else I have gained a sense of a purpose and an orderliness which it does not seem to me can have stemmed from accident alone.
It seems to me, thinking of it, that there must be some universal plan which set in motion the orbiting of the electrons about the nucleus and the slower, more majestic orbit of the galaxies about one another to the very edge of space. There is a plan, it seems to me, that reaches out of the electron to the rim of the universe and what this plan may be or how it came about is beyond my feeble intellect. But if we are looking for something on which to pin our faith — and, indeed, our hope — the plan might well be it. I think we have thought too small and have been too afraid...
Ch 24
A Choice of Gods (1972)

Get Off His Back, The American Spectator, 2 September 2005, 2011-09-03 http://spectator.org/archives/2005/09/02/get-off-his-back-updated,
referring to Hurricane Katrina