In numbers warmly pure and sweetly strong.
Well may your hearts believe the truths I tell:
'T is virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.
How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes bless'd!
By fairy hands their knell is rung;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair,
To dwell a weeping hermit there!
When Music, heavenly maid, was young,
While yet in early Greece she sung.
Fill'd with fury, rapt, inspired.
'T was sad by fits, by starts 't was wild.
In notes by distance made more sweet.
In hollow murmurs died away.
O Music! sphere-descended maid,
Friend of Pleasure, Wisdom's aid!
In yonder grave a Druid lies.
Too nicely Jonson knew the critic's part;
Nature in him was almost lost in Art.
Each lonely scene shall thee restore;
For thee the tear be duly shed,
Belov'd till life can charm no more,
And mourn'd till Pity's self be dead.
Just take a trifling handful, O philosopher!
Of magic matter: give it a slight toss over
The ambient ether--and I don't see why
You should n't make a sky.
Life and the Universe show spontaneity;
Down with ridiculous notions of Deity!
Churches and creeds are lost in the mists;
Truth must be sought with the Positivists.
In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.
Character is what you know you are, not what others think you have.
To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it.
A wise man thinks what is easy is difficult.
The problem with beauty is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer.
By starving emotions we become humorless, rigid and stereotyped; by repressing them we become literal, reformatory and holier-than-thou; encouraged, they perfume life; discouraged, they poison it.
The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.
How sleep the brave, who sink to rest, By all their country's wishes blest! . . . . By fairy hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung.
Too nicely Jonson knew the critic's part, Nature in him was almost lost in art.
Wings of angels, tears of saints won't bring you back to me (about her son's suicide) (He will come back to her.. the soul is deathless).