Give me, indulgent gods with mind serene, And guiltless heart, to range the sylvan scene, No splendid poverty, no smiling care, No well-bred hate, or servile grandeur, there.
Let no man trust the first false step of guilt; it hangs upon a precipice, whose steep descent in last perdition ends.
Our birth is nothing but our death begun, As tapers waste the moment they take fire.
Fond man! the vision of a moment made! Dream of a dream! and shadow of a shade!
Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.
An angel’s arm can’t snatch me from the grave; legions of angels can’t confine me there.
Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness.
Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote.
The love of praise, howe’er conceal’d by art, Reigns more or less, and glows in ev’ry heart.
Inhumanity is caught from man, From smiling man.
However smothered under former negligence, or scattered through the dull, dark mass of common thoughts – let thy genius rise as the sun from chaos.
A dearth of words a woman need not fear; But ’tis a task indeed to learn to hear: In that the skill of conversation lies; That shows and makes you both polite and wise.
The soft whispers of the God in man.
We nothing know, but what is marvellous; Yet what is marvellous, we can’t believe.
The melancholy ghosts of dead renown, Whispering faint echoes of the world’s applause.
Wishing of all employments is the worst.
Midway from Nothing to the Deity!
On every thorn, delightful wisdom grows, In every rill a sweet instruction flows.
We wish our names eternally to live; Wild dream! which ne’er had haunted human thought, Had not our natures been eternal too.
A man I knew who lived upon a smile, And well it fed him; he look’d plump and fair, While rankest venom foam’d through every vein.