Thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers.
But that from us aught should ascend to Heav’n So prevalent as to concern the mind Of God, high-bless’d, or to incline His will, Hard to belief may seem; yet this will prayer.
In vain doth valour bleed, While Avarice and Rapine share the land.
Who knows not Circe, The daughter of the Sun, whose charmed cup Whoever tasted, lost his upright shape, And downward fell into a groveling swine?
Now the bright morning-star, day’s harbinger, comes dancing from the east.
The greatest burden in the world is superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home.
But now my task is smoothly done, I can fly, or I can run Quickly to the green earth’s end, Where the bow’d welkin slow doth bend, And from thence can soar as soon To the corners of the Moon.
Yet much remains To conquer still; peace hath her victories No less renowned then war, new foes arise Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains: Help us to save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.
Necessity and chance Approach not me, and what I will is fate.
It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope And hazard in the glorious enterprise.
Ah gentle pair, ye little think how nigh Your change approaches, when all these delights Will vanish and deliver ye to woe, More woe, the more your taste is now of joy.
O when meet now Such pairs, in love and mutual honour joined?
Death to life is crown or shame.
Pandemonium, the palace of Satan rises, suddenly built of the deep: the infernal peers there sit in council.
Commands are no constraints.
Firm they might have stood, yet fell; remember, and fear to transgress.
Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
I made him just and right, sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Ye cannot make us now lesse capable, lesse knowing, lesse eagarly pursuing of the Truth, unlesse ye first make yourselves that made us so, lesse the lovers, lesse the founders of our true Liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formall, and slavish as ye found us, but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous as they were from whom ye have free’d us.