Bartleby, The Scrivener - Herman Mellville

• Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitting to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? Sometimes from out the folder paper the pale clerk takes a ring—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more... on errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

Old Letters - Edna St. Vincent Millay

• I know not why I am so loath to lay
• Your yellowed leaves along the glowing log,
• Unburied dead, that cling about and clog–
• With indisputable, insistent say
• Of the stout past’s all inefficient fray–
• The striving present, rising like a fog
• To rust the active me, that am a cog
• In the great wheel of industry today.
• Yet, somehow, in this visible farewell
• To the crude symbols of a simpler creed,
• I find a pain that had not parallel
• When passed the faith itself, – we give small heed
• To incorporeal truth, let slack or swell;
• But truth made tangible, is truth indeed.