Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Wish
What ardently we wish, we soon believe.
Young—Night VII. Part II. Line 1311. Cowper.—On his Mother’s Picture, Line 38.
1.I never thought to hear you speak again.
2.Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.
Shakespeare.—King Henry IV., Part II. Act IV. Scene 4. (The King to his Son, who had his father’s crown on his head.)
Thy ominous tongue gives utterance to thy wish.
Ramage Gk. authors.—P. 10, from Æschylus; and again p. 104, from Arrianus.
Men’s thoughts are much according to their inclination.
Bacon.—Essay XXXIX. of Custom.
The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul.
Tennyson.—In Memoriam, LIV. Verse 1.
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar stairs
That slope through darkness up to God.
Tennyson.—In Memoriam, LIV. Verse 4.
I stretch lame hands of faith and grope—
And faintly trust the larger hope.
Tennyson.—In Memoriam, LIV. Verse 5.
I know no more.
Tennyson.—In Memoriam, LV. Verse 2.
Two Herveys had a mutual wish
To please in separate stations;
The one invented “Sauce for Fish,”
The other “Meditations.”
Each has his pungent powers applied
To aid the dead and dying;
That relishes a sole when fried,
This saves a soul from frying.
Anonymous.
I’ve often wish’d that I had clear,
For life, six hundred pounds a-year,
A handsome house to lodge a friend,
A river at my garden’s end,
A terrace walk, and half a rood
Of land set out to plant a wood.
Swift.—Horace, Satire VI. Book II.
What all men wish’d, though few could hope to see,
We are now bless’d with, and obliged by thee.
Waller.—To Mr. Creech.
Wishing, of all employments, is the worst,
Philosophy’s reverse; and health’s decay!
Dr. Young.—Night IV. Line 71.
Thy fickle wish is ever on the wing.
Dr. Young.—Night VIII. Line 917.
Fate wings with every wish the afflictive dart,
Each gift of nature, and each grace of art.
Johnson.—The Vanity of Human Wishes, Line 15.