O impotence of mind, in body strong! But what is strength without a double share Of wisdom, vast, unwieldy, burdensome, Proudly secure, yet liable to fall By weakest subtleties, not made to rule, But to subserve where wisdom bears command.
Ornate rhetorick taught out of the rule of Plato.... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.
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?
Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
We shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.
Abraham Lincoln, White House speech 11 April 1865.
Or arm th' obdured breast
With stubborn patience as with triple steel.
Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me; from the cheerful ways of men Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair Presented with a universal blank Of Nature's works, to me expung'd and raz'd, And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
Those graceful acts, those thousand decencies, that daily flow from all her words and actions, mixed with love and sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned union of mind, or in us both one soul.
Hate is of all things the mightiest divider, nay, is division itself. To couple hatred, therefore, though wedlock try all her golden links, and borrow to tier aid all the iron manacles and fetters of law, it does but seek to twist a rope of sand.