United States or Australia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Most of the essential melancholy of the world is due to this realization, and most of the feeling of pessimism and futility thus has its origin. Mortal man a worm of the earth a brief flower doomed to perish and all of it finds final expression in Gray's marvelous words: "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour.
O thou poor, feeble, fleeting, pow'r, By Vice seduc'd, by Folly woo'd, By Mis'ry, Shame, Remorse, pursu'd; And as thy toilsome steps proceed, Seeming to Youth the fairest flow'r, Proving to Age the rankest weed, A gilded but a bitter pill, Of varied, great, and complicated ill! These lines are harsh, but they indicate an internal wretchedness, which I own, affects me.
Permit me, then, my friends, to address you in the words of Achilles to Hector: "Rouse, then, your forces this important hour, Collect your strength and call forth all your pow'r." Since, to adopt the animated language of Neptune to the Greeks,
But if making our own acquaintance would give some of us a good deal of surprise and even pain, it would also do most of us a useful turn as well. Burns put the case quite clearly in his familiar lines: O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us: It wad frae monie a blunder free us An' foolish notion.
And they themselves once ferried o'er the wave That parts us, are emancipate and loos'd. Spread it then, And let it circulate through every vein Of all your empire that where Britain's pow'r Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too."
"Wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us," we might often be surprised to discover what a wealth of real affection and esteem lies hid under the glacier of Anglican indifference. The American poet who found his song in the heart of a friend could have done so, were the friend English, only by the aid of a post-mortem examination.
He wildly errs who thinks I yield Precedence in the well-cloth'd field, Tho' mix'd with wheat I grow: Indulgent Ceres knew my worth, And to adorn the teeming earth, She bade the Poppy blow. Nor vainly gay the sight to please, But blest with pow'r mankind to ease, The goddess saw me rise: "Thrive with the life-supporting grain," She cried, "the solace of the swain, The cordial of his eyes.
"It's hardly in a body's pow'r To keep at times frae being sour, To see how things are shar'd How best o' chiels are whiles in want, While coofs on countless thousands rant, And kenna how to wair't." Epistle to Davie.
Two great examples have been shown to-day, To what sure ruin passion does betray, What long repentance to short joys is due, When reason rules, what glory must ensue. If you will love, love like Eliza then, Love for amusement, like those traitors, men. Think that the pastime of a leisure hour She favor'd oft but never shar'd her pow'r.
Then, cautious, watch the vacant hour, When Bacchus reigns in all his pow'r; When, crowned with rosy chaplets gay, Catos might read my frolic lay."61 Do you not think that the poet who wrote of me in such terms deserved some friendly marks of my bounty then, and of my sorrow now? For he gave me the very best he had to bestow, and would have given more had it been in his power.