John Dryden (1631 – 1700)
Influential English poet, literary critic, and playwright.
Ill habits gather by unseen degrees —
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
Sound the trumpets; beat the drums...
Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes.
I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric...
Timotheus, to his breathing flute,
And sounding lyre,
Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.
Words, once my stock, are wanting to commend
So great a poet and so good a friend.
I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
For present joys are more to flesh and blood
Than a dull prospect of a distant good.
Death in itself is nothing; but we fear
To be we know not what, we know not where.
Drinking is the soldier’s pleasure;
Rich the treasure;
Sweet the pleasure;
Sweet is pleasure after pain.
As long as words a different sense will bear,
And each may be his own interpreter,
Our airy faith will no foundation find;
The word's a weathercock for every wind.
So, when the last and dreadful Hour
This crumbling Pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And musick shall untune the Sky.
Whistling to keep myself from being afraid.
Since heaven's eternal year is thine.
T' abhor the makers, and their laws approve,
Is to hate traitors and the treason love.
Than a successive title long and dark,
Drawn from the mouldy rolls of Noah's ark.
Behold him setting in his western skies,
The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise.
She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.
Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense,
But good men starve for want of impudence.
So over violent, or over civil,
That every man with him was God or Devil.
Chaucer followed Nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her.