We look before and after, With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Oh! it is ecstacy in early days, Shelley. When youth is ours-before the scorching rays That makes the sky more blue, the earth more green— Forgetting earth and all that therein lowers; For then the soul unto eternity Looks, and awhile the better world is ours: But it is otherwise in after years; The dews that were in youth are changed to tears; And though as blue the heavens-the earth as green, Alas! we see them not as we have seen. Mrs. E. Thomas. AGE. THE sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon; With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; Is second childishness and mere oblivion; I have lived long enough: my way of life Shakspere. AGE. Though now this grained face of mine be hid Youth no less becomes The light and careless livery that it wears, Beshrew my jealousy! It seems it is as proper to our age 25 Shakspere. To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions, To lack discretion. Shakspere. Shakspere. Age sits with decent grace upon his visage, What is age But the holy place of life, chapel of ease As from a priest to steal a holy vestment, Rowe. Aye, and convert it to a sinful covering.—Massinger. Life ebbs from such old age, unmark'd and silent, These are the effects of doting age. Old Play. Vain doubts, and idle cares, and over caution. Dryden. And on this forehead, where your verse has said, Insulting age will trace his cruel way, And leave sad marks of his destructive sway. Fresh hopes are hourly sown In furrow'd brows: to gentle life's descent, Prior. Young. —I left him in a green old age, And looking like the oak, worn, but still steady Yet time, who changes all, had alter'd him Byron. And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the_brim. Byron. Thus aged men, full loth and slow, And count their youthful follies o'er, Now then the ills of age, its pains, its care, Scott. Crabbe. This heart, by age and grief congeal'd, Rightly it is said That man descends into the. vale of years; Yet have I thought that we might also speak, Miller. Wordsworth. AGE. On which 'tis not impossible to set What is youth?-a_dancing billow, Thus fares it still in our decay, Wordsworth. And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away, Than what it leaves behind. Wordsworth. Let no one judge the worth of life, save he Whose head is white with time. The youthful spirit Set on the edge o' the world hath but one sight, And looks for beauty in the years to come; But like double-fronted Janus, looks age, All ways, and ponders wisely on the past.-Procter. Bid me not trust her hoary parent's smile! But died in'ts youth! Trust not in furrowed brow; Like mist upon the lea, And like night upon the plain, So mirthful, and so brief; Procter. Come, like frost upon the leaf.-Robert Nicol. 28 28 ALCHEMY. ALDERMAN. ALEXANDRINE. ALCHEMY. To solemnize this day the glorious sun O he sits high in all the people's hearts! Princes do but play us; compared to this, Which set the chemist on To search that secret natured stone, But being hunted and not caught, Donne. Oh! sad reverse! turns gold to naught.—Arbuthnot. ALDERMAN. THOUGH my own alderman conferred my bays, Oh! prudence, if by friends in council swayed, Pope. I might have been an alderman at least.-Chatterton. ALEXANDRINE. THEN, at the last, and only couplet fraught And, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Pope. |