Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)
Considered one of the greatest English poets of the eighteenth century.
Let opening roses knotted oaks adorn,
And liquid amber drop from every thorn.
On all the line a sudden vengeance waits,
And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates.
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.
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.
Teach me to feel another's woe,
To right the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
Here am I, dying of a hundred good symptoms.
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.
The stoic husband was the glorious thing.
The man had courage, was a sage, 'tis true,
And lov'd his country.
Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.
There, take (says Justice), take ye each a shell:
We thrive at Westminster on fools like you;
'T was a fat oyster,—live in peace,—adieu.
Such were the notes thy once lov'd poet sung,
Till death untimely stopp'd his tuneful tongue.
Absent or dead, still let a friend be dear.
Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain,
Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain.
Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise!
Each stamps its image as the other flies!
Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea.
Our passions are like convulsion-fits, which, though they make us stronger for the time, leave us the weaker ever after.
Not chaos-like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But as the world, harmoniously confus'd,
Where order in variety we see,
And where, though all things differ, all agree.
Nor Fame I slight, nor her favors call;
She comes unlooked for, if she comes at all.
Histories are more full of Examples of the Fidelity of dogs than of Friends.
I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another's misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.