Elegant Extracts: Or, Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Young Persons ; Being Similar in Design to Elegant Extracts in Prose

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Vicesimus Knox
T. Longman, 1796 - English poetry - 1008 pages
 

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Page 232 - Soon as she spreads her hand, th' aerial guard Descend, and sit on each important card : First Ariel perch'd upon a matadore, Then each, according to the rank they bore ; For sylphs, yet mindful of their ancient race, Are, as when women, wondrous fond of place.
Page 22 - And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds...
Page 23 - One morn I missed him on the customed hill, Along the heath, and near his favourite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the rill, Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he; 'The next with dirges due in sad array Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne. Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay. Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.
Page 265 - And born to write, converse, and live with ease: Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne...
Page 225 - She gives in large recruits of needful pride ; For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find What wants in blood and spirits, swell'd with wind : Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, And fills up all the mighty void of sense.
Page 231 - But what, or where, the fates have wrapt in night. Whether the nymph shall break Diana's law, Or some frail China jar receive a flaw ; Or stain her honour, or her new brocade; Forget her pray'rs...
Page 306 - I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes, For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes ? But of King David's foes, be this the doom, May all be like the young man Absalom ; And, for my foes, may this their blessing be, To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee...
Page 245 - Uncheck'd may rise, and climb from art to art; But when his own great work is but begun, What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone. Trace Science then, with modesty thy guide; First strip off...
Page 242 - AWAKE, my St John ! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man ; A mighty maze ! but not without a plan ; A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot ; Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.
Page 280 - Are what ten thousand envy and adore : All, all look up with reverential awe, At crimes that 'scape or triumph o'er the law; While truth, worth, wisdom, daily they decry: Nothing is sacred now but villainy.

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