Arm the obdured breast with stubborn patience as with triple steel.
No worthy enterprise can be done by us without continual plodding and wearisomeness to our faint and sensitive abilities.
Praise from an enemy smells of craft.
A good principle not rightly understood may prove as hurtful as a bad.
Retiring from the popular noise, I seek This unfrequented place to find some ease.
Therefore, if at great things thou wouldst arrive, Get riches first, get wealth.
For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil sub-stance.
At His birth a star, unseen before in heaven, proclaims Him come.
He who tempts, though in vain, at last asperses The tempted with dishonor foul, supposed Not incorruptible of faith, not proof Against temptation.
Courage never to submit of yield.
Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth With such a full and unwithdrawing hand, Covering the earth with odours, fruits, flocks, Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable, But all to please and sate the curious taste?
Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck’d.
Such as the meeting soul may pierce, In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out.
See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds, With joy and love triumphing.
Yet beauty, though injurious, hath strange power, After offence returning, to regain Love once possess’d.
With a smile that glow’d Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue.
Smiles from reason flow, To brute deny’d, and are of love the food.
Fairy elves, Whose midnight revels by a forest side Or fountain some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon Sits arbitress.
Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson’s learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild.
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy.