Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)
Considered one of the greatest English poets of the eighteenth century.
From old Belerium to the northern main.
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.
Here am I, dying of a hundred good symptoms.
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
Teach me to feel another's woe,
To right the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.
There various news I heard of love and strife,
Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life,
Of loss and gain, of famine and of store,
Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore,
Of prodigies, and portents seen in air,
Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair,
Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,
The fall of favourites, projects of the great,
Of aid mismanagements, taxations new:
All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.
By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,
By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,
By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned,
By strangers honored, and by strangers mourned.
On all the line a sudden vengeance waits,
And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates.
Let opening roses knotted oaks adorn,
And liquid amber drop from every thorn.
It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow necked bottles: the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.
Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? in every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.
How vast a memory has Love!
He who tells a lie, is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O grave! where is thy victory?
O death! where is thy sting?
You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come;
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home.
Ignobly vain, and impotently great.
What dire offence from amorous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things!
Thou Great First Cause, least understood
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art good
And that myself am blind.
The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole
Can never be a mouse of any soul.
When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.