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Page 370 - Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect...
Page 37 - See heaven its sparkling portals wide display, And break upon thee in a flood of day ! No more the rising sun shall gild the morn, Nor evening Cynthia fill her silver horn ; But lost, dissolved, in thy superior rays, One tide of glory, one unclouded blaze, O'erflow thy courts : the Light himself shall shine Revealed, and God's eternal day be thine...
Page 25 - True wit is nature to advantage dressed, — What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed; Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind.
Page 364 - Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike...
Page 49 - First follow Nature, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged, and universal light, Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of Art. Art from that fund each just supply provides; Works without show, and without pomp presides: In some fair body thus th...
Page 52 - For. wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas. and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity. thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy: judgment. on the contrary. lies quite on the other side. in separating carefully one from another ideas wherein can be found the least difference. thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another.
Page 183 - Consult the genius of the place in all; .That tells the waters or to rise or fall; Or helps the ambitious hill the heavens to scale Or scoops in circling theatres the vale : Calls in the country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from 'shades: Now breaks, or now directs, the intending lines ; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.
Page 359 - For Modes of Faith let graceless zealots fight; He can't be wrong whose life is in the right...
Page 370 - The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men...
Page 361 - Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole. On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but Passion is the gale ; Nor God alone in the still calm we find, He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind.

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