How miserable a thing is a Great Man !—
Take noisy vexing Greatness they that please;
Give me obscure and safe and silent ease.
Acquaintance and commerce let me have none
With any powerful thing but Time alone:
My rest let Time be fearful to offend,
And creep by me as by a slumbering friend;
Till, with ease glutted, to my bed I steal,
As men to sleep after a plenteous meal.
O wretched he who, call'd abroad by power,
To know himself can never find an hour!
Strange to himself, but to all others known,
Lends every one his life, but uses none;
So, ere he tasted life, to death he goes;
And himself loses, ere himself he knows. Crowne.
Mind constituted to Goodness.
you may do this, or any thing you have a mind to; even in your fantasy there is a secret counsel, seeing that all your actions, nay all your pleasures, are in some exercise of virtue. H. Killigrew.
To man how sweet is breath! yet sweetest of all
That breath, which from his native air doth fall.
How many weary paces have I measured,
How many known and unknown dangers past,
Since I commenced my tedious pilgrimage,
The last great work of my death-yielding age!
Yet am I blest, that my returning bones
Shall be rak't up in England's peaceful earth. Anon.
Nature in all inferior things hath set
A pitch or term, when they no more shall get
Increase and offspring. Unrepaired houses
Fall to decay; old cattle cease to breed ;
And sapless trees deny more fruit or seed:
The earth would heartless and infertile be,
If it should never have a jubilee.
Only the Usurer's Money 'genders still;
The longer, lustier; age this doth not kill.
He lives to see his Money's Money's Money
Even to a hundred generations reach.
Love defined by contraries.
Fie, fie, how heavy is light Love in me !—
How slow runs swift Desire !—this leaden air,
This ponderous feather, merry melancholy;
This Passion, which but in passion
Hath not his perfect shape.—
What are we but our words? when they are past, Faith should succeed, and that should ever last.
I knew your eye would be first served;
That's the soul's taster still for grief or joy.
I thought the lost perfection of mankind
Was in that man restored; and I have grieved,
Lost Eden too was not revived for him ;
And a new Eve, more excellent than the first,
Created for him, that he might have all
The joys he could deserve: and he fool'd me
To think that Eve and Eden was in me :
That he was made for me, and I for him. Crowne.
Tis a vain glory that attends a Lover,
Never to say he quits; and, when Hope dies.
The gallantry of Love still lives, is charm'd
With kindness but in shadow
I hate these potent madmen, who keep all
Mankind awake, while they by their great deeds
Are drumming hard upon this hollow world,
Only to make a sound to last for ages.
What is't we live for ?-tell life's finest tale—
To eat, to drink, to sleep, love, and enjoy,
And then to love no more!
To talk of things we know not, and to know
Nothing but things not worth the talking of.
Sir R. Fane, jun.
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