“The keenest pangs the wretched find
Are rapture to the dreary void,
The leafless desert of the mind,
The waste of feelings unemployed.”

Ben è un ramo senza foglia,
Fiume senz' acqua e casa senza via,
La gentilezza senza cortesia.
LXIV, 61
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato

Par une de ces journées sombres qui attristent la fin de l'année, et que rend encore plus mélancoliques le souffle glacé du vent du Nord, écoutez, en lisant Ossian, la fantastique harmonie d'une harpe éolienne balancée au sommet d'un arbre dépouillé de verdure, et vous pourrez éprouver un sentiment profond de tristesse, un désir vague et infini d'une autre existence, un dégoût immense de celle-ci.
Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, ch. 39 http://www.hberlioz.com/Writings/HBM39.htm; Eleanor Holmes, Rachel Holmes and Ernest Newman (trans.) Memoirs of Hector Berlioz from 1803 to 1865 (New York: Dover, 1966) pp. 156-7.
Criticism

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book VI, Lines 268–269 (tr. John Dryden)

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), Dreams (1845)

February, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912)
Context: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Source: Emma

Pharonida (1659), Part II, Book IV.