Nor from hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place.
But hail thou Goddess sage and holy, Hail, divinest Melancholy, Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight, And therefore to our weaker view O’erlaid with black, staid Wisdom’s hue.
And I will place within them as a guide My umpire conscience, whom if they will hear Light after light well used they shall attain, And to the end persisting, safe arrive.
And now without redemption all mankind Must have been lost, adjudged to death and hell By doom severe.
The low’ring element Scowls o’er the darken’d landscape.
As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?
And sing to those that hold the vital shears; And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound.
The liberty of conscience, which above all other things ought to be to all men dearest and most precious.
Dim eclipse, disastrous twilight.
For liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands.
Capricious, wanton, bold, and brutal Lust Is meanly selfish; when resisted, cruel; And, like the blast of Pestilential Winds, Taints the sweet bloom of Nature’s fairest forms.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, With charm of earliest birds.
Hail universal Lord, be bounteous still To give us only good; and if the night Have gathered aught of evil or concealed, Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark.
So little knows Any, but God alone, but perverts best things To worst abuse, or to their meanest use.
To many a youth and many a maid, dancing in the chequer’d shade.
And some are fall’n, to disobedience fall’n, And so from Heav’n to deepest Hell; O fall From what high state of bliss into what woe!
Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.
On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep, was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep.
The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.