Dryden: Poetry & Prose: With Essays by Congreve, Johnson, Scott and Others

Framsida
Clarendon Press, 1925 - 204 sidor

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Sida 150 - All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily ; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned ; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature ; he looked inwards, and found her there.
Sida 114 - Flushed with a purple grace He shows his honest face: Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes! Bacchus , ever fair and young , Drinking joys did first ordain : Bacchus...
Sida 150 - I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid ; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him...
Sida 53 - tis all a cheat; Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit; Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay: To-morrow's falser than the former day; Lies worse, and, while it says, we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Sida 69 - Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit, Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit. Great wits are sure to madness near allied. And thin partitions do their bounds divide; Else why should he, with wealth and honor blest.
Sida 107 - Less than a god they thought there could not dwell Within the hollow of that shell, That spoke so sweetly, and so well. What passion cannot Music raise and quell?
Sida 118 - At last divine Cecilia came, Inventress of the vocal frame ; The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store, Enlarged the former narrow bounds, And added length to solemn sounds, With nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before.
Sida 74 - A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome : Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon ; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Sida 82 - ALL human things are subject to decay, And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey. This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young Was called to empire, and had governed long. In prose and verse was owned, without dispute, Through all the realms of Nonsense absolute.
Sida 152 - But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him. With the spoils of these writers he so represents old Rome to us, in its rites, ceremonies, and customs, that if one of their poets had written either of his tragedies, we had seen less of it than in him.

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