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From his brimstone bed, at break of day,
A-walking the Devil is gone,

To look at his little snug farm of the World,

And see how his stock went on.

They sin who tell us love can die;
With life all other passions fly,
All others are but vanity.

The Devil's Walk. Stanza 1.

Love is indestructible,

Its holy flame forever burneth;
From heaven it came, to heaven returneth.

It soweth here with toil and care,
But the harvest-time of love is there.

The Curse of Kehama. Canto x. Stanza 10.

Oh, when a mother meets on high
The babe she lost in infancy,

Hath she not then for pains and fears,
The day of woe, the watchful night,
For all her sorrow, all her tears,
An over-payment of delight?

Stanza 11.

Thou hast been called, O sleep! the friend of woe;
But 't is the happy that have called thee so.

Canto xv. Stanza 11.

The Satanic school.

Vision of Judgment. Original Preface.

CHARLES LAMB. 1775-1834.

The red-letter days now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

Oxford in the Vacation. For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.

Ibid.

A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist.

game.

Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.

Not if I know myself at all.

It is good to love the unknown.

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A Chapter on Ears.

The Old and New Schoolmaster.

Valentine's Day.

The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy. Essays of Elia. My First Play.

Presents, I often say, endear absents.

It argues an insensibility.

A Dissertation upon Roast Pig.

Ibid.

Books which are no books.

Detached Thoughts on Books.

Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.

Gone before

To that unknown and silent shore.

Amicus Redivivus.

Hester. Stanza 7.

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days.
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

For thy sake, tobacco, I
Would do anything but die.

Old Familiar Faces.

A Farewell to Tobacco.

And half had staggered that stout Stagirite.

Written at Cambridge.

Who first invented work, and bound the free
And holiday-rejoicing spirit down

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To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood?

Sabbathless Satan!

I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!
In whose capacious all-embracing leaves

Work.

The very marrow of tradition 's shown;

And all that history, much that fiction weaves.
To the Editor of the Every-Day Book.

He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an orna

ment to society.

Neat, not gaudy.1

Captain Starkey.

Letter to Wordsworth, 1806.

Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold! Lamb's Suppers.

Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me." Autobiographical Recollections. (Leslie.)

JAMES SMITH. 1775-1839.

No Drury Lane for you to-day.

Rejected Addresses. The Baby's Début.

I saw them go: one horse was blind,
The tails of both hung down behind,
Their shoes were on their feet.

Lax in their gaiters, laxer in their gait.

Ibid.

The Theatre.

WILLIAM PITT.

A strong nor'-wester's blowing, Bill!
Hark! don't ye hear it roar now?
Lord help 'em, how I pities them
Unhappy folks on shore now!

1 See Shakespeare, page 130.

-1840.

The Sailor's Consolation.

My eyes! what tiles and chimney-pots

About their heads are flying!

The Sailor's Consolation.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 1775-1864.

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see,

A night of memories and of sighs

I consecrate to thee.

Wearers of rings and chains!

Pray do not take the pains

To set me right.

In vain my faults ye quote;

I write as others wrote

On Sunium's hight.

Rose Aylmer.

The last Fruit of an old Tree. Epigram cvi.

Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's,1
Therefore on him no speech! And brief for thee,
Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walk'd along our roads with steps
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.

To Robert Browning.

The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue
Within, and they that lustre have imbibed
In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave:
Shake one, and it awakens; then apply
Its polisht lips to your attentive ear,

1 Nor sequent centuries could hit

Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.

Ibid.

R. W. EMERSON: May-Day and Other Pieces. Solution.

And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.1
Gebir. Book i. (1798).

Past are three summers since she first beheld
The ocean; all around the child await
Some exclamation of amazement here.
She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,
Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?
That wondrous soul Charoba once possest,
Capacious, then, as earth or heaven could hold,
Soul discontented with capacity,-

Is gone (I fear) forever. Need I say
She was enchanted by the wicked spells
Of Gebir, whom with lust of power inflamed
The western winds have landed on our coast?
I since have watcht her in lone retreat,
Have heard her sigh and soften out the name.2

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved; and next to Nature, Art.

I warm'd both hands against the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Book ii.

Dying Speech of an old Philosopher.

THOMAS CAMPBELL. 1777-1844.

"T is distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure hue.8

1 See Wordsworth, page 480.

Pleasures of Hope. Part i. Line 7.

Poor shell! that Wordsworth so pounded and flattened in his marsh it no longer had the hoarseness of a sea, but of a hospital. - LANDOR: Letter to John Forster.

2 These lines were specially singled out for admiration by Shelley, Humphrey Davy, Scott, and many remarkable men. - FORSTER: Life of Landor, vol. i. p. 95.

8 See John Webster, page 181.

The mountains too, at a distance, appear airy masses and smooth, but seen near at hand they are rough. - DIOGENES LAERTIUS: Pyrrho, ix.

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