The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.
But see, the shepherds shun the noonday heat, The lowing herds to murmuring brooks retreat, To closer shades the panting flocks remove; Ye gods! And is there no relief for love?
Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil’d; if right, I kiss’d the rod.
Here am I, dying of a hundred good symptoms.
Index-learning turns no student pale, Yet holds the eel of Science by the tail. Index-learning is a term used to mock pretenders who acquire superficial knowledge merely by consulting indexes.
On wings of wind came flying all abroad.
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
And each blasphemer quite escape the rod, Because the insult’s not on man, but God?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleas’d to the last he crops the flow’ry food, And licks the hand just rais’d to shed his blood.
For I, who hold sage Homer’s rule the best, Welcome the coming, speed the going guest.
Expression is the dress of thought.
The people’s voice is odd, It is, and it is not, the voice of God.
Let fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, so long as she never makes us lose our honesty and our independence.
Oh, blindness to the future! kindly giv’n, That each may fill the circle mark’d by heaven.
Whate’er the talents, or howe’er designed, We hang one jingling padlock on the mind.
Thus God and nature linked the gen’ral frame, And bade self-love and social be the same.
To dazzle let the vain design, To raise the thought and touch the heart, be thine!
And hence one master-passion in the breast, Like Aaron’s serpent, swallows up the rest.
And soften’d sounds along the waters die: Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play.
How glowing guilt exalts the keen delight!