Beautiful as sweet, And young as beautiful, and soft as young, And gay as soft, and innocent as gay!
Early, bright, transient, chaste as morning dew, She sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven.
The booby father craves a booby son, And by Heaven’s blessing thinks himself undone.
Insatiate archer! could not one suffice? Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain; And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn.
The man that makes a character, makes foes.
Pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps; And pyramids are pyramids in vales. Each man makes his own stature, builds himself. Virtue alone outbuilds the Pyramids; Her monuments shall last when Egypt’s fall.
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne, In rayless majesty, now stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o’er a slumbering world.
There buds the promise of celestial worth.
Man makes a death which Nature never made. And feels a thousand deaths in fearing one.
Affliction is the good man’s shining scene; prosperity conceals his brightest ray; as night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.
Horace appears in good humor while he censures, and therefore his censure has the more weight, as supposed to proceed from judgment and not from passion.
What tender force, what dignity divine, what virtue consecrating every feature; around that neck what dross are gold and pearl!
A dedication is a wooden leg.
With fame, in just proportion, envy grows.
The spirit walks of every day deceased.
Poor in abundance, famish’d at a feast.
Fame is the shade of immortality, And in itself a shadow. Soon as caught, Contemn’d; it shrinks to nothing in the grasp.
Nothing in Nature, much less conscious being, Was e’er created solely for itself.
Joys season’d high, and tasting strong of guilt.
Tis immortality, ’tis that alone, Amid life’s pains, abasements, emptiness, The soul can comfort, elevate, and fill. That only, and that amply this performs.