Selected Poems: The Essay on Criticism ; The Moral Essays

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Longmans, 1896 - 114 pages
 

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Page 99 - Excise. A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.
Page 77 - Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help...
Page 36 - Whether the charmer sinner it, or saint it, If folly grow romantic, I must paint it. Come, then, the colours and the ground prepare! Dip in the rainbow, trick her off in air; Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.
Page 9 - Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
Page 12 - whispers through the trees :" If crystal streams " with pleasing murmurs creep," The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with " sleep :" Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
Page 77 - The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and •cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.
Page 53 - Or in proud falls magnificently lost, But clear and artless, pouring through the plain Health to the sick, and solace to the swain. Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows? Whose seats the weary traveller repose ? Who taught that Heav'n-directed spire to rise? " The Man of Ross,
Page 63 - So proud, so grand: of that stupendous air, Soft and agreeable come never there. Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdignag before your thought. To compass this, his building is a town, His pond an ocean, his parterre a down : Who but must laugh, the master when he sees, A puny insect, shivering at a breeze!
Page 63 - His gardens next your admiration call, On every side you look, behold the wall ! No pleasing intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene ; Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, And half the platform just reflects the other.
Page 12 - Though oft the ear the open vowels tire; While expletives their feeble aid do join; And ten low words oft creep in one dull line: While they ring round the same unvaried chimes With sure returns of still expected rhymes: Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze...

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