The British essayists, with prefaces by A. Chalmers, Volumes 29-30

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Page 160 - Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod...
Page 160 - tis too horrible ! The weariest and most loathed worldly life, ^ That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death.
Page 134 - That care, however, which watched his health was not repaid with success ; he was always more delicate, and more subject to little disorders than I; and at last, after completing his seventh year, was seized with a fever, which, in a few days, put an end to his life, and transferred to me the inheritance of my ancestors.
Page 238 - And will he not come again? And will he not come again? No, no, he is dead; Go to thy death-bed, He never will come again. His beard was as white as snow All flaxen was his poll, He is gone, he is gone, And we cast away moan: God ha
Page 235 - The spirit that I have seen May be the devil : and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, — As he is very potent with such spirits, — Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds More relative than this: — the play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
Page 157 - Were I a father, I should take a particular care to preserve my children from these little horrors of imagination, which they are apt to contract when they are young, and are not able to shake off when they are in years.
Page 152 - I care not, fortune, what you me deny ; You cannot rob me of free nature's grace ; You cannot shut the windows of the sky, Through which Aurora shows her brightening face, You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve : Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace, And I their toys to the great children leave : Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave.
Page 233 - O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword; The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
Page 122 - And wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse, contemplation, She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i...
Page 89 - Taller, which, though it has every appearance of a real dream, comprehends a moral so sublime and so interesting, that I question whether any man who attends to it can ever forget it ; and if he remembers, whether he can ever cease to be the better for it.

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