Our two first parents, yet the only two Of mankind, in the happy garden placed, Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love, Uninterrupted joy, unrivalled love In blissful solitude.
As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore. Or if I would delight my private hours With music or with poem, where so soon As in our native language can I find That solace?
How oft, in nations gone corrupt, And by their own devices brought down to servitude, That man chooses bondage before liberty. Bondage with ease before strenuous liberty.
We should be wary what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books, since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life.
Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?