In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.
The music, and the banquet, and the wine-- The garlands, the rose odors, and the flowers, The sparkling eyes, and flashing ornaments-- The white arms and the raven hair--the braids, And bracelets; swan-like bosoms, and the necklace, An India in itself, yet dazzling not.
But mighty Nature bounds as from her birth;
The sun is in the heavens, and life on earth:
Flowers in the valley, splendor in the beam,
Health on the gale, and freshness in the stream.
If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.
My slumbers--if I slumber--are not sleep, But a continuance of enduring thought, Which then I can resist not: in my heart There is a vigil, and these eyes but close To look within; and yet I live, and bear The aspect and the form of breathing men.
But at sixteen the conscience rarely gnaws So much, as when we call our old debts in At sixty years, and draw the accounts of evil, And find a deuced balance with the devil.