The life and letters of William Cowper, Volume 3

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Page 405 - That ere through age or woe I shed my wings I may record thy worth with honour due, In verse as musical as thou art true, And that immortalizes whom it sings: — But thou hast little need. There is a Book By seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light, On which the eyes of God not rarely look, A chronicle of actions just and bright — There all thy deeds, my faithful Mary, shine ; And since thou own'st that praise, I spare thee mine.
Page 404 - MARY ! I want a lyre with other strings, Such aid from Heaven as some have feigned they drew, An eloquence scarce given to mortals, new And undebased by praise of meaner things, That, ere through age or woe I shed...
Page 228 - The world could not have furnished you with a present so acceptable to me, as the picture which you have so kindly sent me. I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should have felt, had the dear original presented herself to my embraces. I kissed it and hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, and of course the first on which I open my eyes in the morning.
Page 460 - Implored your highness' pardon and set forth A deep repentance: nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it; he died As one that had been studied in his death, To throw away the dearest thing he owed As 'twere a careless trifle.
Page 90 - Alas! sir, I have heretofore borrowed help from him; but he is a gentleman of so much reading that the people of our town cannot understand him.
Page 69 - Poor Burns loses much of his deserved praise in this country, through our ignorance of his language. I despair of meeting with any Englishman who will take the pains that I have taken to understand him. His candle is bright, but shut up in a dark lantern.
Page 460 - ... person at the point of death, we cannot forbear being attentive to every thing he says or does, because we are sure that some time or other we shall ourselves be in the same melancholy circumstances. The general, the statesman, or the philosopher, are perhaps characters which we may never act in, but the dying man is one whom, sooner or later, we shall certainly resemble.
Page 66 - Poems, and have read them twice ; and, though they be written in a language that is new to me, and many of them on subjects much inferior to the author's ability, I think them, on the whole, a very extraordinary production.
Page 186 - ... stile, what you said on that particular spot. For this reason I purpose, when the summer is come, to walk with a book in my pocket ; what I read at my fireside I forget, but what I read under a hedge, or at the side of a pond, that pond and that hedge will always bring to my remembrance ; and this is a sort of memoria technica, which I would recommend to you, if I did not know that you have no occasion for it.
Page 90 - ... him. The waggon has accordingly gone this day to Northampton loaded in part with my effusions in the mortuary style. A fig for poets who write epitaphs upon individuals ! I have written one, that serves two hundred persons.

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