He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper.

And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination.

Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.

He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse.