Works: In English Verse, Volume 3

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1763

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Page 149 - A universe of death ; which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd, Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.
Page 287 - He made darkness his secret place, his pavilion round about Him with dark water, and thick clouds to cover Him.
Page 208 - ... and tradition. The poet took the matters of fact as they came down to him, and circumstanced them after his own manner, to make them appear the more natural, agreeable, or surprising.
Page 187 - ... a particular beauty, which I do not know that any one has taken notice of. The list which he has there drawn up was in general to do honour to the Roman name, but more particularly to compliment Augustus. For this reason Anchises, who shows .¿Eneas most of the rest of his descendants in the same order that they were to make their appearance in the world...
Page 184 - Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose The divine property of her first being. Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres, Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave, As loth to leave the body that it loved, And linked itself by carnal sensualty To a degenerate and degraded state.
Page 259 - Soft is the ftrain when Zephyr gently blows, And the fmooth ftream in fmoother numbers flows ; But when loud furges lafh the founding more, The hoarfe rough verfe mould like the torrent roar.
Page 208 - We find, however, that he has interwoven, in the course of his fable, the principal particulars, which were generally believed among the Romans, of jEneas's voyage and settlement in Italy.
Page 30 - This people, like the rest of mankind, in their descriptions of the other world, used to copy from something they were well acquainted with in this. In their funeral rites, which, as we observed, was...
Page 12 - Orpheus is said to go to hell by the power of his harp: that is, in quality of lawgiver; the harp being the known symbol of his laws, by which he humanized a rude and barbarous people. So again, in the lives of Hercules and Bacchus, we have the true history, and the fable founded on it, blended and recorded together.
Page 232 - The latent tracts, the giddy heights, explore Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye Nature's walks, shoot Folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; But vindicate the ways of God to man.

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