Learning is like mercury, one of the most powerful and excellent things in the world in skillful hands; in unskillful, the most mischievous.
Dogs, ye have had your day!
Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last.
Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.
Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.
By flatterers besieged And so obliging that he ne’er obliged.
The dances ended, all the fairy train For pinks and daisies search’d the flow’ry plain.
The lot of man – to suffer and to die.
These riches are possess’d, but not enjoy’d!
Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice – A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.
Our business in the field of fight, Is not to question, but to prove our might.
Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought.
The light of Heaven restore; Give me to see, and Ajax asks no more.
A mighty maze! But not without a plan.
The season when to come, and when to go, to sing, or cease to sing, we never know.
And write about it, Goddess, and about it!
What woeful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me! But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines!
Good sense, which only is the gift of Heaven, And though no science, fairly worth the seven.
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company.