A History of English Poetry, Volume 4

Front Cover
Macmillan, 1911
 

Contents

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 163 - This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,— often the surfeit of our own behaviour,— we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars : as if we were villains by necessity ; fools by' heavenly compulsion ; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance ; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence...
Page 193 - gainst self-slaughter. O God ! O God ! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this. world ! Fie on't ! Oh, fie, fie ! 'tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed ; things rank, and gross in nature, Possess it merely.
Page 115 - I do despise my dream. Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace ; Leave gormandizing ; know the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men...
Page 44 - O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand...
Page 167 - Lear. My wits begin to turn. — Come on, my boy : how dost, my boy? Art cold? I am cold myself. — Where is this straw, my fellow ? The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel. — Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart That 's sorry yet for thee.
Page 44 - tis true I have gone here and there And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new.
Page 194 - That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: So excellent a king, that was to this Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth ! Must I remember? why, she would hang on him, As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on; and yet, within a month, Let me not think on't: Frailty, thy name is woman!
Page 162 - Thou, nature, art my goddess ; to thy law My services are bound : Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom ; and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me, For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother...
Page 102 - Swift as a shadow, short as any dream ; Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth. And ere a man hath power to say, — Behold ! The jaws of darkness do devour it up : So quick bright things come to confusion.
Page 189 - O, who can hold a fire in his hand, By thinking on the frosty Caucasus ? " Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite, By bare imagination of a feast ? Or wallow naked in December snow, By thinking on fantastic k summer's heat?

Bibliographic information