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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Armstrong

  • For pale and trembling anger rushes in
  • With faltering speech, and eyes that wildly stare,
  • Fierce as the tiger, madder than the seas,
  • Desperate and armed with more than human strength.
  • Good native Taste, tho’ rude, is seldom wrong,
  • Be it in music, painting, or in song:
  • But this, as well as other faculties,
  • Improves with age and ripens by degrees.
  • He chooses best, whose labor entertains
  • His vacant fancy most; the toil you hate
  • Fatigues you soon, and scarce improves your limbs.
  • He knows enough, the mariner, who knows
  • Where lurk the shelves, and where the whirlpools boil,
  • What signs portend the storm: to subtler minds
  • He leaves to scan, from what mysterious cause
  • Charybdis rages in the Ionian wave;
  • Whence those impetuous currents in the main
  • Which neither oar nor sail can stem; and why
  • The roughening deep expects the storm, as sure
  • As red Orion mounts the shrouded heaven.
  • How happy he whose toil
  • Has o’er his languid pow’rless limbs diffus’d
  • A pleasing lassitude; he not in vain
  • Invokes the gentle Deity of dreams.
  • His pow’rs the most voluptuously dissolve
  • In soft repose; on him the balmy dews
  • Of Sleep with double nutriment descend.
  • Music exalts each joy, allays each grief,
  • Expels diseases, softens every pain,
  • Subdues the rage of poison and of plague.
  • Of right and wrong he taught
  • Truths as refined as ever Athens heard;
  • And (strange to tell!) he practised what he preach’d.
  • Riches are oft by guilt and baseness earn’d;
  • Or dealt by chance to shield a lucky knave,
  • Or throw a cruel sunshine on a fool.
  • But for one end, one much-neglected use,
  • Are riches worth your care; (for nature’s wants
  • Are few, and without opulence supplied;)
  • This noble end is, to produce the soul;
  • To show the virtues in their fairest light;
  • To make humanity the minister
  • Of bounteous Providence; and teach the breast
  • The generous luxury the gods enjoy.
  • The body***
  • Much toil demands; the lean elastic less.
  • While winter chills the blood and binds the veins,
  • No labors are too hard; by those you ’scape
  • The slow diseases of the torpid year,
  • Endless to name.
  • There are, while human miseries abound,
  • A thousand ways to waste superfluous wealth,
  • Without one fool or flatterer at your board,
  • Without one hour of sickness or disgust.
  • There is, they say, (and I believe there is),
  • A spark within us of th’ immortal fire,
  • That animates and moulds the grosser frame;
  • And when the body sinks, escapes to heaven;
  • Its native seat, and mixes with the gods.
  • Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones,
  • And tottering empires rush by their own weight.
  • ’Tis chiefly taste, or blunt, or gross, or fine,
  • Makes life insipid, bestial, or divine.
  • Better be born with taste to little rent
  • Than the dull monarch of a continent;
  • Without this bounty which the gods bestow,
  • Can Fortune make one favorite happy? No.
  • Toil, and be strong; by toil the flaccid nerves
  • Grow firm, and gain a more compacted tone:
  • The greener juices are by toil subdued,
  • Mellow’d, and subtilis’d; the vapid old
  • Expell’d, and all the rancor of the blood.
  • Virtue and sense are one; and trust me still
  • A faithless heart betrays the head unsound.
  • Virtue (for meree good nature is a fool)
  • Is sense and spirit with humanity.
  • ’Tis sometimes angry, and its frown confounds;
  • ’Tis even vindictive, but in vengeance just,
  • Knaves fain would laugh at it; some great ones dare
  • But at his heart the most undaunted son
  • Of Fortune dreads its name and awful charms.
  • Virtue and sense are one; and, trust me, still
  • A faithless heart betrays the head unsound.
  • Virtue, the strength and beauty of the soul,
  • Is the best gift of heaven; a happiness
  • That, even above the smiles and frowns of fate,
  • Exalts great Nature’s favorites; a wealth
  • That ne’er encumbers, nor can be transferr’d.
  • What avails it that indulgent Heaven
  • From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
  • If we, ingenious to torment ourselves,
  • Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
  • Enjoy the present; nor with needless cares
  • Of what may spring from blind misfortune’s womb,
  • Appal the surest hour that life bestows.
  • Serene, and master of yourself, prepare
  • For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven.
  • Your friends avoid you, brutishly transform’d
  • They hardly know you, or if one remains
  • To wish you well, he wishes you in heaven.
  • ’T is not for mortals always to be blest.