The British Poets: Including Translations ...

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C. Whittingham, 1822 - Classical poetry

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Page 32 - AWAKE, my St John ! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man ; A mighty maze ! but not without a plan ; A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot ; Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.
Page 6 - Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss ; A fool might once himself alone expose, Now one in verse makes many more in prose. 'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
Page 17 - Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense : Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows ; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar : When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labours, and the words move slow ; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Page 218 - And when I die, be sure you let me know Great Homer died three thousand years ago. Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipt me in ink, my parents', or my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came...
Page 126 - The world recedes: it disappears! Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears With sounds seraphic ring: Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly! O Grave! where is thy Victory? O Death! where is thy Sting.
Page 8 - First follow Nature, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature! still divinely bright, One clear, unchang'd, and universal light, Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of art. Art from that fund each just supply provides; Works without show, and without pomp presides : In some fair body thus th...
Page 38 - What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam : Of smell, the headlong lioness between, And hound sagacious on the tainted green : Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood, To that which warbles through the vernal wood ? The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine ! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line : In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From pois'nous herbs extracts the healing dew?
Page 34 - Hope humbly then ; with trembling pinions soar, Wait the great teacher, Death ; and God adore. What future bliss, he gives not thee to know, But gives that hope to be thy blessing now. Hope springs eternal in the human breast : Man never Is, but always to be blest ; The soul, uneasy, and confined from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Page 63 - Some are and must be greater than the rest, More rich, more wise: but who infers from hence That such are happier, shocks all common sense.
Page 16 - In words as fashions the same rule will hold, Alike fantastic if too new or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

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