The British essayists; with prefaces by A. Chalmers, Volume 35

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Page 123 - And, missing thee, I walk unseen On the dry smooth-shaven green, To behold the wandering moon, Riding near her highest noon, Like one that had been led astray Through the heaven's wide pathless way, And oft, as if her head she bowed, Stooping through a fleecy cloud.
Page 69 - But to Ossian thou lookest in vain, for he beholds thy beams no more ; whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art perhaps like me for a season ; thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds careless of the voice of the morning.
Page 68 - O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth, in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave. But thou thyself movest alone: who can be a companion of thy course!
Page 68 - The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven, but thou art for ever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course.
Page 69 - When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds, and laughest at the storm. But to Ossian thou lookest in vain, for he beholds thy beams no more; whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west.
Page 189 - Now spring returns : but not to me returns The vernal joy my better years have known ; Dim in my breast life's dying taper burns, And all the joys of life with health are flown. Starting and shiv'ring in th...
Page 188 - I never look on his dwelling, — a small thatched house, distinguished from the cottages of the other inhabitants only by a sashed <wm~ do<w at the end, instead of a lattice, fringed with a honey-suckle plant, which the poor youth had trained around it ; - I never find myself in that spot, but I stop my horse involuntarily; — and looking on the window, which the honey-suckle has now almost covered, in the dream of the moment, I picture out a figure for the gentle tenant of the mansion ; I wish,...
Page 190 - Farewell, ye blooming fields ! ye cheerful plains ! Enough for me the churchyard's lonely mound, Where melancholy with still silence reigns, And the rank grass waves o'er the cheerless ground. There let me wander at the shut of eve.
Page 122 - And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale. Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the landscape round, it measures Russet lawns, and fallows gray, Where the nibbling flocks do stray ; Mountains, on whose barren breast The laboring clouds do often rest ; Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks, and rivers wide...
Page 86 - I have said, about two years ago, when it was my husband's ill-luck to receive one day from a customer, in payment of a pound of sugar, a crooked piece of silver, which he, at first, mistook for a shilling, but found, on examination, to have some strange characters upon it, which neither of us could make any thing of. An acquaintance coming in, who, it seems, had some knowledge of those matters, declared it at once to be a very curious coin of Alexander the Third ; and, affirming that he knew a virtuoso...

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