Sorrow’s faded form, and solitude behind.
The different steps and degrees of education may be compared to the artificer’s operations upon marble; it is one thing to dig it out of the quarry, and another to square it, to give it gloss and lustre, call forth every beautiful spot and vein, shape it into a column, or animate it into a statue.
The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.
In buskined measures move Pale Grief and pleasing Pain, With Horror, tyrant of the throbbing breast.
The Attic warbler pours her throat, Responsive to the cuckoo’s note, The untaught harmony of spring.
Can storied urn, or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly rising o’er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm.
As to posterity, I may ask what has it ever done to oblige me?
Hell is full of good intentions.
The time will come, when thou shalt lift thine eyes To watch a long-drawn battle in the skies. While aged peasants, too amazed for words, Stare at the flying fleets of wondrous birds.
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor.
Now as the Paradisiacal pleasures of the Mahometans consist in playing upon the flute and lying with Houris, be mine to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.
Visions of glory, spare my aching sight! Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!
Ruin seize thee, ruthless king! Confusion on thy banners wait! Though fann’d by Conquest’s crimson wing, They mock the air with idle state.
The applause of list’ning senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land, And read their history in a nation’s eyes.
Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade! Ah, fields beloved in vain! Where once my careless childhood stray’d, A stranger yet to pain! I feel the gales that from ye blow A momentary bliss bestow.
And weep the more, because I weep in vain.
Here rests his head upon the lap of earth, A youth to fortune and to fame unknown: Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
Rich with the spoils of time.