Elegant extracts in poetry, Volume 2

Front Cover

From inside the book

Selected pages

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 790 - How sleep the Brave who sink to rest By all their country's wishes blest! When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, Returns to deck their hallowed mould, She there shall dress a sweeter sod Than Fancy's feet have ever trod. By fairy hands their knell is rung; By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay; And Freedom shall awhile repair, To dwell a weeping hermit there!
Page 745 - Had ye been there, for what could that have done? What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, The Muse herself for her enchanting son, Whom universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?
Page 640 - Neither a borrower nor a lender be ; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all : to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Page 631 - His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear'd arm Crested the world : his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends ; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder.
Page 589 - The seasons' difference : as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter's wind, Which when it bites and blows upon my body, Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say, This is no flattery : these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am.
Page 662 - tis true, this god did shake : His coward lips did from their colour fly ; And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world Did lose his lustre : I did hear him groan : Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans Mark him, and write his speeches in their books, , Alas ! it cried, " Give me some drink, Titinius,
Page 664 - If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. You all do know this mantle : I remember The first time ever Caesar put it on; 'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent, That day he overcame the Nervii: — Look, in this place, ran Cassius...
Page 643 - The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. See what a grace was seated on this brow ; Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill ; A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man : This was your husband.
Page 745 - Built in th' eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark, That sunk so low that sacred head of thine. Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow, His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge, Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe. "Ah! who hath reft," quoth he, "my dearest pledge?
Page 661 - This England never did, (nor never shall,) Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them : Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true.

Bibliographic information