INCLUDING IMITATIONS, PLAGIARISMS, AND ACCIDENTAL COINCIDENCES.
Pretensions to originality are ludicrous.—Byron’s Letters.
An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures.—Twelfth Night, V. 1.
Milton “borrowed” other poets’ thoughts, but he did not borrow as gipsies borrow children, spoiling their features that they may not be recognized. No, he returned them improved. Had he “borrowed” your coat, he would have restored it with a new nap upon it!—Leigh Hunt.
Man wants but little here below,
Nor wants that little long.—Goldsmith: Hermit.
Evidently stolen from Dr. Young:—
Man wants but little, nor that little long.—Night Thoughts.
Be wise to-day: ’tis madness to defer.—Night Thoughts.
But Congreve had said, not long before,—
Defer not till to-morrow to be wise;
To-morrow’s sun to thee may never rise.—Letter to Cobham.
Like angels’ visits, few and far between.—Campbell: Pleasures of Hope.
Copied from Blair:—
——like an ill-used ghost
Not to return;—or if it did, its visits,
Like those of angels, short and far between.—Grave.
But this pretty conceit originated with Norris, of Bemerton, (died 1711,) in a religious poem:—
But those who soonest take their flight
Are the most exquisite and strong:
Like angels’ visits, short and bright,
Mortality’s too weak to bear them long.—The Parting.
Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,
Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart.—Gray’s Bard.
Gray himself points out the imitation in Shakspeare:—
You are my true and honorable wife;
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.—Julius Cæsar, Act II. Sc. 1.
Otway also makes Priuli exclaim to his daughter,—
Dear as the vital warmth that feeds my life,
Dear as these eyes that weep in fondness o’er thee.—Venice Preserved.
And leave us leisure to be good.—Gray: Ode to Adversity.
And know, I have not yet the leisure to be good.—Oldham.
Thou tamer of the human breast,
Whose iron scourge and torturing hour
The bad affright, afflict the best.—Gray: Ode to Adversity.
When the scourge
Inexorably, and the torturing hour,
Calls us to penance.—Milton: Paradise Lost.
Lo, where the rosy-bosomed hours,
Fair Venus’ train, appear!—Gray: Ode to Spring.
The graces and the rosy-bosomed hours
Thither all their bounties bring.—Milton: Comus.
En hic in roseis latet papillis.—Catullus.
Full many a gem, of purest ray serene,
The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.—Gray: Elegy.
There kept my charms concealed from mortal eye,
Like roses that in deserts bloom and die.—Pope: Rape of the Lock.
In distant wilds, by human eye unseen,
She rears her flowers and spreads her velvet green;
Pure gurgling rills the lonely desert trace,
And waste their music on the savage race.—Young.
And, like the desert’s lily, bloom to fade.—Shenstone: Elegy IV.
Nor waste their sweetness on the desert air.—Churchill, Gotham.
Which else had wasted in the desert air.
Lloyd: Ode at Westminster School.
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.—Gray: Elegy.
And left the world to wretchedness and me.—Moss: Beggar’s Petition.
The swallow oft beneath my thatch
Shall twitter from her clay-built nest, &c.—The Wish.
Doubtless suggested to Rogers by the lines in Gray’s Elegy:—
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from her straw-built shed, &c.
The bloom of young desire and purple light of love.—Gray.
Lumenque juventæ purpureum.—Virgil. Æn. I. 590.
And quaff the pendent vintage as it grows.
Gray: Alliance of Education and Government.
For this expression Gray was indebted to Virgil:—
Non eadem arboribus pendet vindemia nostris, &c.—Georg. ii. 89.
The attic warbler pours her throat.—Gray: Ode to Spring.
Is it for thee the linnet pours her throat?—Pope: Essay on Man.
Gray says concerning the blindness of Milton,—
He passed the flaming bounds of space and time:
The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.
(Dr. Johnson remarks that if we suppose the blindness caused by study in the formation of his poem, this account is poetically true and happily imagined.)
Hermias, a Galatian writer of the second century, says of Homer’s blindness,—
When Homer resolved to write of Achilles, he had an exceeding desire to fill his mind with a just idea of so glorious a hero: wherefore, having paid all due honors at his tomb, he entreats that he may obtain a sight of him. The hero grants his poet’s petition, and rises in a glorious suit of armor, which cast so insufferable a splendor that Homer lost his eyes while he gazed for the enlargement of his notions.
(Pope says if this be any thing more than mere fable, one would be apt to imagine it insinuated his contracting a blindness by too intense application while he wrote the Iliad.)
Hume’s sarcastic fling at the clergy in a note to the first volume of his history is not original. He says,—
The ambition of the clergy can often be satisfied only by promoting ignorance, and superstition, and implicit faith, and pious frauds; and having got what Archimedes only wanted,—another world on which he could fix his engine,—no wonder they move this world at their pleasure.
In Dryden’s Don Sebastian, Dorax thus addresses the Mufti:—
Content you with monopolizing Heaven,
And let this little hanging ball alone;
For, give you but a foot of conscience there,
And you, like Archimedes, toss the globe.
Dryden says of the Earl of Shaftesbury,—
David for him his tuneful harp had strung,
And Heaven had wanted one immortal song.—Absalom and Achitophel.
Pope adopts similar language in addressing his friend Dr. Arbuthnot:—
Friend of my life! which did not you prolong,
The world had wanted many an idle song.
For truth has such a face and such a mien,
As to be loved needs only to be seen.—Dryden.
Vice is a monster of such hideous mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen.—Pope.
Great wits to madness nearly are allied.—Dryden: Abs. and Achit.
Seneca said, eighteen centuries ago,—
Nullum magnum ingenium absque mistura dementiæ est:—De Tranquil.;
and Aristotle had said it before him (Problemata).
Praise undeserved is satire in disguise.—Pope: Imit. Horace.
Sir Walter Scott says in his Woodstock,—in the scene where Alice Lee, in the presence of Charles II. under the assumed name of Louis Kerneguy, describes the character she supposes the king to have:—
Kerneguy and his supposed patron felt embarrassed, perhaps from a consciousness that the real Charles fell far short of his ideal character as designed in such glowing colors. In some cases exaggerated or inappropriate praise becomes the most severe satire.
Ye little stars, hide your diminished rays.—Pope: Epistle to Bathurst.
At whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads.—Milton.
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can,
But vindicate the ways of God to man.—Pope: Essay on Man.
And justify the ways of God to man.—Milton: Paradise Lost.
On Butler who can think without just rage,
The glory and the scandal of the age?—Oldham: Satire against Poetry.
Probably borrowed by Pope in the following lines:—
At length Erasmus, that great injured name,
The glory of the priesthood and the shame.—Essay on Criticism.
And more true joy Marcellus, exiled, feels,
Than Cæsar with a senate at his heels.—Pope: Essay on Man.
Drawn from Bolingbroke, who plagiarized the idea from Seneca, who says,—
O Marcellus, happier when Brutus approved thy exile than when the commonwealth approved thy consulship.
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight:
He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right—Pope: Essay on Man.
Taken from Cowley:—
His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might
Be wrong: his life, I’m sure, was in the right.
Is it, in heaven, a crime to love too well?—Pope: Elegy.
Imitated from Crashawe’s couplet:—
And I,—what is my crime? I cannot tell,
Unless it be a crime to have loved too well.
Lamartine, in his Jocelyn, has the same expression:—
Est-ce un crime, O mon Dieu, de trop aimer le beau?
A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits.—Dunciad.
This smart piece of antithesis Pope borrowed from Quinctilian, who says,—
Qui stultis eruditi videri volunt; cruditi stulti videntur.
Dr. Johnson also hurled this missile at Lord Chesterfield, calling him “A lord among wits, and a wit among lords.” The earl had offended the rugged lexicographer, whose barbarous manners in company Chesterfield holds up, in his Letters to his son, as things to be avoided.
Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.—Pope: Rape of the Lock.
This has a strong affinity with a passage in Howell’s Letters:—
’Tis a powerful sex: they were too strong for the first, for the strongest, and for the wisest man that was: they must needs be strong, when one hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen.
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made.—Goldsmith: Deserted Vil.
Probably from De Caux, an old French poet, who says,—
———————— C’est un verre qui luit,
Qu’un souffle peut détruire, et qu’un souffle a produit.
Kings are like stars,—they rise and set,—they have
The worship of the world, but no repose.—Shelley: Hellas.
Stolen from Lord Bacon:—
Princes are like to heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times, and which have much veneration, but no rest.—Of Empire.
Burke, in speaking of the morals of France prior to the Revolution, says,—
Vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
This statement—the falsity of which is apparent—is disproved by a score of contradictions. Let Lord Bacon suffice:—
Another [of the Rabbins] noteth a position in moral philosophy, that men abandoned to vice do not so much corrupt manners as those that are half good and half evil.—Advancement of Learning.
Things not to be trusted:—
A bright sky,
A smiling master,
The cry of a dog,
A harlot’s sorrow.
Howitt’s Literature and Romance of Northern Europe.
Grant I may never be so fond
To trust man in his oath or bond,
Or a harlot for her weeping,
Or a dog that seems a-sleeping.
Apemantus’ Grace.—Timon of Athens.
The collocation of dogs and harlots in both passages is very remarkable.
All human race, from China to Peru,
Pleasure, howe’er disguised by art, pursue.
Warton: Universal Love of Pleasure, 1748.
Let observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru.
Dr. Johnson: Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749.
Shakspeare’s dreamy Dane says,—
Man delights not me, nor woman neither.
A sentiment very nearly expressed in Horace’s Ode to Venus:—
Me nec femina, nec puer,
Jam nec spes animi credula mutui.
Nec certare juvat mero, &c.—Lib. IV.
(As for me, neither woman, nor youth, nor the fond hope of mutual inclination, &c. delight me.)
The world’s a theatre, the earth a stage,
Which God and nature do with actors fill;
Kings have their entrance with due equipage,
And some their parts play well, and others ill.
Thomas Heywood: Apology for Actors, 1612.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his life plays many parts.
Shakspeare: As You Like It.
Palladas, a Greek poet of the third century, has the following, translated by Merivale:—
This life a theatre we well may call,
Where every actor must perform with art,
Or laugh it through and make a farce of all,
Or learn to bear with grace his tragic part.
Pythagoras, who lived nearly two centuries later, also said,—
This world is like a stage whereon many play their parts.
Among the epigrams of Palladas may be found the original of a modern saw, the purport of which is that an ignoramus, by maintaining a prudent silence, may pass for a wise man:—
Πᾶς τις ἀπαιδευτος φρονιμώτατος ἔστι σιωπῶν.
Shakspeare uses it in the Merchant of Venice:—
O my Antonio, I do know of these
That therefore only are reputed wise
For saying nothing.—Act I. Sc. 1.
We come crying hither:
Thou knowest the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry.——
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.—King Lear, IV. 6.
Tum porro puer,——
Vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut æquum est
Cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum.
Lucretius: De Rer. Nat.
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns.—Hamlet, Act III.
Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
Illuc unde negant redire quemquam.—Catullus.
A similar form of expression occurs in the Book of Job, x. 21, and xvi. 22; but it is probable, from this and other passages, that Shakspeare’s acquaintance with the Latin writers was greater than has been generally supposed. One of the commentators on Hamlet, in pointing out the similarity of ideas in the lines commencing, “The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,” &c. (Act I.) and the hymn of St. Ambrose in the Salisbury collection,—
Preco diei jam sonat,
Noctis profundæ pervigil;
Nocturna lux viantibus,
A nocte noctem segregans.
Hoc excitatus Lucifer,
Solvit polum caligine;
Hoc omnis errorum chorus
Viam nocendi deserit.
Gallo canente spes redit, &c.,
has the following remark. “Some future Dr. Farmer may, perhaps, show how Shakspeare became acquainted with this passage, without being able to read the original; for the resemblance is too close to be accidental. But this, with many other passages, and especially his original Latinisms of phrase, give evidence enough of a certain degree of acquaintance with Latin,—doubtless not familiar nor scholar-like, but sufficient to give a coloring to his style, and to open to him many treasures of poetical thought and diction not accessible to the merely English reader. Such a degree of acquirement might well appear low to an accomplished Latinist like Ben Jonson, and authorize him to say of his friend,—
Though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek;—
yet the very mention of his ‘small Latin’ indicates that Ben knew that he had some.”
Mr. Fox, the orator, remarked on one occasion that Shakspeare must have had some acquaintance with Euripides, for he could trace resemblances between passages of their dramas: e.g. what Alcestis in her last moments says about her servants is like what the dying Queen Katharine (in Henry the Eighth) says about hers, &c.
That Shakspeare “may often be tracked in the snow” of Terence, as Dryden remarks of Ben Jonson, is evident from the following:—
Master, it is no time to chide you now:
Affection is not rated from the heart.
If love hath touched you, naught remains but so,—
Redime te captum quam queas minimo.—Taming of the Shrew, I. 1.
The last line is manifestly an alteration of the words of Parmeno in The Eunuch of Terence:—
Quid agas, nisi ut te redimas captum quam queas minimo?—Act I. Sc. 1.
In another play Terence says,—
Facile omnes, cum valemus, recta consilia, ægrotis damus;
Tu si hic sis, aliter censeas.—Andrian XI. 1.
Shakspeare has it,—
Men
Can counsel and give comfort to that grief
Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it,
Their counsel turns to passion.
.tb
’Tis all men’s office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow;
But no man’s virtue, nor sufficiency,
To be so moral when he shall endure
The like himself.—Much Ado about Nothing, V. 1.
Apropos of this sentiment, Swift says,—
I never knew a man who could not bear the misfortunes of others with the most Christian resignation.—Thoughts on Various Subjects.
And La Rochefoucauld,—
We have all of us sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others.—Max. 20.
Falstaff says, in 1 Henry IV. ii. 4,—
For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.
Shakspeare evidently here parodied an expression in Sir John Lyly’s Euphues:—
Though the camomile, the more it is trodden and pressed downe, the more it spreadeth; yet the violet, the oftener it is handled and touched, the sooner it withereth and decaieth.
Two verses in Titus Andronicus appear to have pleased Shakspeare so well that he twice subsequently closely copied them:—
She is a woman, therefore may be wooed,
She is a woman, therefore may be won.—Titus Andron. II. 1.
She’s beautiful, and therefore to be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore to be won.—First Part Henry VI., V. 3.
Was ever woman in this humor wooed?
Was ever woman in this humor won?—Richard III., I. 2.
Though Shakspeare has drawn freely from others, he is himself a mine from which many builders have quarried their materials,—a Coliseum
“from whose mass
Walls, palaces, half cities, have been reared.”
Honor and shame from no condition rise:
Act well your part, there all the honor lies.—Pope: Essay on Man.
This is only a new rendering of the thought thus expressed by Shakspeare:—
From lowest place when virtuous things proceed,
The place is dignified by the doer’s deed.—All’s Well that Ends Well, II. 3.
Let rusty steel a while be sheathed,
And all those harsh and rugged sounds
Of bastinadoes, cuts, and wounds,
Exchanged to love’s more gentle style.—Hudibras, P. II. c. 1.
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.—Richard III, I. 1.
The military figure of Shakspeare’s musical lines,—
Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and on thy cheeks,
And Death’s pale flag is not advanced there.—Romeo and Juliet, V. 3,
is closely imitated by Chamberlain:—
The rose had lost
His ensign in her cheeks; and tho’ it cost
Pains nigh to death, the lily had alone
Set his pale banners up.—Pharonidas.
A dream
Dreamed by a happy man, while the dark cast
Is slowly brightening to his bridal morn.—Tennyson.
Copied from the Merchant of Venice:—
Then music is
As those dulcet sounds in break of day,
That creep into the dreaming bridegroom’s ear
And summon him to marriage.—III. 2.
How can we expect another to keep our secret if we cannot keep it ourselves?—La Rochefoucauld, Max. 90.
Toute révélation d’un secret est la faute de celui qui l’a confié.—La Bruyere: De la Société.
I have played the fool, the gross fool, to believe
The bosom of a friend would hold a secret
Mine own could not contain.—Massinger: Unnatural Combat, V. 2.
Ham.—Do not believe it.
Ros.—Believe what?
Ham.—That I can keep your counsel, and not mine own.
Shakspeare: Hamlet, IV. 2.
Anger is like
A full-hot horse, who being allowed his way,
Self mettle tires him.—Henry VIII. I. 1.
Let passion work, and, like a hot-reined horse,
’Twill quickly tire itself.—Massinger: Unnatural Combat.
Is this the Talbot so much feared abroad
That with his name the mothers still their babes?—Henry VI. II. 3.
Nor shall Sebastian’s formidable name
Be longer used to lull the crying babe.—Dryden: Don Sebastian.
Chili’s dark matrons long shall tame
The froward child with Bertram’s name.—Scott: Rokeby.
It were better to be eaten to death with rust than to be scoured to nothing by perpetual motion.—Henry IV., Second Part, I. 2.
Reversed by Byron:—
Better to sink beneath the shock
Than moulder piecemeal on the rock.—Giaour.
’Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus.—Cymbeline.
No lips did seem so fair
In his conceit—through which he thinks doth fly
So sweet a breath that doth perfume the air.
Marston: Pygmalion’s Image.
Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just;
And he but naked, though locked up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.—2 Henry VI. III. 2.
I’m armed with more than complete steel—
The justice of my quarrel.—Marlowe: Lust’s Dominion.
All that glisters is not gold.—Merchant of Venice, II.
Yet gold all is not that doth golden seeme.
Spenser: Faerie Queene, II.
Double, double, toil and trouble.—Macbeth.
Πόνος, πόνῳ, πόνον, φέρει.—Sophocles: Ajax.
We shall not look upon his like again.—Hamlet, I.
Quando ullum inveniet parem?—Horace.
None but himself can be his parallel.—Theobald.
Quæris Alcidæ parem?
Nemo est nisi ipse.—Seneca: Hercules Furens.
The following song from Shakspeare’s Measure for Measure, commencing as follows, is copied verbatim in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Bloody Brother:—
Take, O! take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
But my kisses bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain.
The following line occurs both in Pope’s Dunciad and Addison’s Campaign:—
Rides on the whirlwind, and directs the storm.
Ben Jonson borrowed his celebrated ballad To Celia,—
Drink to me only with thine eyes, &c.,
from Philostratus, a Greek poet, who flourished at the court of the Emperor Severus.
In Milton’s description of the lazar-house occurs the following confused metaphor:—
Sight so deform what heart of rock could long
Dry-eyed behold?
Derived from a similar combination in Tibullus:—
Flebis; non tua sunt duro præcordia ferro
Vincta, nec in tenero stat tibi corde silex.—El. I. 63.
When Christ, at Cana’s feast, by power divine,
Inspired cold water with the warmth of wine,
See! cried they, while in redd’ning tide it gushed,
The bashful water saw its God and blushed.—Aaron Hill.
Lympha pudica Deum vidit et erubuit.[[33]]—Richard Crashawe.
Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store,
And he that cares for most shall find no more.—Hall.
His wealth is summed, and this is all his store:
This poor men get, and great men get no more.
G. Webster: Vittoria Corombona.
God made the country, and man made the town.—Cowper: Task.
God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.—Cowley.
Hypocrisy, detest her as we may,
May claim this merit still,—that she admits
The worth of what she mimics with such care,
And thus gives virtue indirect applause.—Cowper: Task.
Le vice rend hommage à la vertu en s’honorant de ses apparences.—Massillon.
Love is sweet
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever;
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still.—Shelley: Prometheus Unbound.
It is better to desire than to enjoy, to love than to be loved.—
It makes us proud when our love of a mistress is returned: it ought to make us prouder still when we can love her for herself alone, without the aid of any such selfish reflection. This is the religion of love.—Hazlitt: Characteristics.
People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding up a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.—Sterne: Koran.
Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady.—La Rochefoucauld: Max. 285.
The king can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a’ that,—
* * * * *
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.—Burns.
I weigh the man, not his title; ’tis not the king’s stamp can make the metal bettor or heavier. Your lord is a leaden shilling, which you bend every way, and debases the stamp he bears.
Wycherly: Plain Dealer.
Titles of honor are like the impressions on coin, which add no value to gold and silver, but only render brass current.—Sterne: Koran.
Kings do with men as with pieces of money: they give them what value they please, and we are obliged to receive them at their current, and not at their real, value.—La Rochefoucauld: Max. 160.
Kossuth’s “To him that wills, nothing is impossible,”[[34]] is thus expressed by La Rochefoucauld:—
Nothing is impossible: there are ways which lead to every thing; and if we had sufficient will, we should always have sufficient means.—Max. 255.
Shelley gives the idea as follows:—
It is our will
That thus enchains us to permitted ill.
We might be otherwise: we might be all
We dream of, happy, high, majestical.
Where is the beauty, love, and truth we seek
But in our minds? and if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire?
Julian and Maddolo.
To most men, experience is like the stern-lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.—Coleridge.
We arrive complete novices at the different ages of life, and we often want experience in spite of the number of our years.—La Rochefoucauld: Max. 430.
The same idea may be found in the Adelphi of Terence, Act V. Sc. 2, v. 1–4.
For those that fly may fight again,
Which he can never do that’s slain.—Hudibras.
He who fights and runs away
May live to fight another day.—Sir John Minnes.
But Demosthenes, the famous Grecian orator, had said, long before,—
Ἀνὴρ ὁ φεύγων καὶ πάλιν μαχήσεται.
She could love none but only such
As scorned and hated her as much.—Hudibras.
Horace, in describing such a capricious kind of love, uses the following language:—
—Leporem venator ut alta
In nive sectatur, positum sic tangere nolit;
Cantat et apponit: meus est amor huic similis; nam
Transvolat in medio posita, et fugientia captat.—Satires, Book I. ii.,
which is nearly a translation of the eleventh epigram of Callimachus.
What woful stuff this madrigal would be
In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me!
But let a lord once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens! how the style refines!
Pope: Essay on Criticism.
Molière has the same sentiment:—
Tous les discours sont des sottises
Partant d’un homme sans éclat;
Ce seraient paroles exquises,
Si c’était un grand qui parlat.
It may also be found in Ennius, Euripides, and other writers. The last notability who has expressed the idea is Emerson, who says,—
It adds a great deal to the force of an opinion to know that there is a man of mark and likelihood behind it.
Others may use the ocean as their road,
Only the English make it their abode:—
We tread the billows with a steady foot.—Waller.
Campbell adopts the thoughts of these italicized words in the Mariners of England:—
Britannia needs no bulwark,
No towers along the steep:
Her march is on the mountain-waves,
Her home is on the deep.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake;
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom, and be lost in me.—Tennyson: Princess.
And like a lily on a river floating,
She floats upon the river of his thoughts.
Longfellow: Spanish Student.
You must either soar or stoop,
Fall or triumph, stand or droop;
You must either serve or govern,
Must be slave or must be sovereign;
Must, in fine, be block or wedge,
Must be anvil or be sledge.—Goethe.
In this world a man must be either anvil or hammer.
Longfellow: Hyperion.
Lockhart says, in his Life of Sir Walter Scott, “It was on this occasion, I believe, that Scott first saw his friend’s brother Reginald (Heber), in after-days the Apostolic Bishop of Calcutta. He had just been declared the successful competitor for that year’s poetical prize, and read to Scott at breakfast, in Brazennose College, the MS. of his Palestine. Scott observed that in the verses on Solomon’s Temple one striking circumstance had escaped him, namely, that no tools were used in its erection. Reginald retired for a few minutes to the corner of the room, and returned with the beautiful lines,—
No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung:
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence!” &c.
Cowper had previously expressed the same idea:—
Silently as a dream the fabric rose:
No sound of hammer nor of saw was there:
Ice upon ice, &c.—Palace of Ice.
Milton had also said,—
Anon out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose like an exhalation.—Paradise Lost.
Speech is the light, the morning of the mind:
It spreads the beauteous images abroad
Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul.—
Dryden evidently had in mind the language of Themistocles to the King of Persia:—
Speech is like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in packs (i.e. rolled up, or packed up).
Silence that spoke, and eloquence of eyes.—Pope: Homer’s Iliad, Book XIV.
Voltaire, in his Œdipus, makes Jocasta say,—
Tout parle contre nous, jusqu’à notre silence.
In Milton’s Samson Agonistes we find,—
The deeds themselves, though mute, spoke loud the doer.
“A SORROW’S CROWN OF SORROW.”
A similar thought may be found in Dante:—
——nessun maggior dolore,
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria.—Inferno, Canto v. 121.
(There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time in wretchedness.)
Also Chaucer:—
For of Fortune’s sharpe adversite
The worst kind of infortune is this:
A man to have been in prosperite
And it remember when it passid is.
Troilus and Cresside, B. III.
The same thought occurs in the writings of other Italian poets. See Marino, Adone, c. xiv.; Fortinguerra, Ricciardetto, c. xi.; and Petrarch, canzone 46. The original was probably in Boetius, de Consol. Philosoph.:—
In omni adversitate fortunæ infeliCissimum genus est infortunii fuisse felicem et non esse.—L. ii. pr. 4.
The famous pun in the imitation of Crabbe in the Rejected Addresses:—
The youth, with joy unfeigned,
Regained the felt, and felt what he regained,
and of Holmes in his Urania:—
Mount the new Castor:—ice itself will melt;
Boots, gloves, may fail; the hat is always felt,
had been anticipated by Thomas Heywood in a song:—
But of all felts that may be felt,
Give me your English beaver.
Falstaff’s pun:—
Indeed I am in the waist two yards about; but I am now about no waste; I am about thrift,—(Merry Wives of Windsor.)
had also been anticipated, and may be found in Heywood’s “Epigrammes,” 1562:—
“Where am I least, husband?” Quoth he, “In the waist;
Which cometh of this, thou art vengeance strait-laced.
Where am I biggest, wife?” “In the waste,” quoth she,
“For all is waste in you, as far as I see.”
The same play on the word occurs subsequently in Shirley’s comedy of The Wedding, 1629:—
He is a great man indeed; something given to the waist, for he lives within no reasonable compass.
Moore, in his song Dear Harp of my Country, sings,—
If the pulse of the patriot, soldier, or lover
Have throbbed at our lay, ’tis thy glory alone;
I was but as the wind passing heedlessly over,
And all the wild sweetness I waked was thy own;—
an idea probably caught from Horace’s Ode to Melpomene:—
Totum muneris hoc tui est,
Quod monstror digito prætereuntium
Romanæ fidicen lyræ:
Quod spiro, et placeo, si placeo, tuum est.
(That I am pointed out by the fingers of passers-by as the stringer of the Roman lyre, is entirely thy gift: that I breathe and give pleasure, if I do give pleasure, is thine.)
Now, by those stars that glance
O’er Heaven’s still expanse,
Weave we our mirthful dance,
Daughters of Zea!—Moore: Evenings in Greece.
Beneath the moonlight sky
The festal warblings flowed
Where maidens to the Queen of Heaven
Wove the gay dance.—Keble: Christian Year.
Her ‘prentice han’ she tried on man,
An’ then she made the lassies, O.
Burns: Green Grow, &c.
Man was made when Nature was but an apprentice, but woman when she was a skilful mistress of her art.—Cupid’s Whirligig (1607).
A book, upon whose leaves some chosen plants
By his own hand disposed with nicest care,
In undecaying beauty were preserved;—
Mute register, to him, of time and place
And various fluctuations in the breast;
To her a monument of faithful love
Conquered, and in tranquillity retained.
Wordsworth: Excursion.
Like flower-leaves in a precious volume stored,
To solace and relieve
Some heart too weary of the restless world.—Keble: Christian Year.
Her pretty feet,
Like smiles, did creep
A little out, and then,
As if they started at bo-peep,
Did soon draw in again.—Herrick.
Imitated by Sir John Suckling in his ballad of The Wedding:—
Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out,
As if they feared the light;
But, oh, she dances such a way,
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight!
So the struck eagle, stretched upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
Viewed his own feather on the fatal dart,
And winged the shaft that quivered in his heart:
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel
He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel,
While the same plumage that had warmed his nest
Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast.
Byron: On the Death of Kirke White.
Waller says, in his Lines to a Lady singing a song of his own composing,—
That eagle’s fate and mine are one,
Which, on the shaft that made him die,
Espied a feather of his own
Wherewith he’d wont to soar so high.
Moore uses the same figure:—
Like a young eagle, who has lent his plume
To fledge the shaft by which he meets his doom,
See their own feathers plucked to wing the dart
Which rank corruption destines for their heart.—Corruption.
The original in The Myrmidons of Eschylus has been thus translated:—
An eagle once,—so Libyan legends say,—
Struck to the heart, on earth expiring lay,
And, gazing on the shaft that winged the blow,
Thus spoke:—“Whilst others’ ills from others flow,
To my own plumes, alas! my fate I owe.”
Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies, and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same, and still the more, the more it breaks.
Byron: Childe Harold.
Suggested by the following passage:—
And as Praxiteles did by his glass when he saw a scurvy face in it, brake it to pieces, but for that one he saw many more as bad in a moment.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, Part II., Sect. 3, (mem. 7.)
In her first passion woman loves her lover,
In all the others, all she loves is love, &c.—Byron: Don Juan.
Borrowed from La Rochefoucauld:—
Dans les premières passions les femmes aiment l’amant; dans les autres elles aiment l’amour.—Max. 494.
In the same place Byron adds:—
Although, no doubt, her first of love-affairs
Is that to which her heart is wholly granted,
Yet there are some, they say, who have had none;
But those who have ne’er end with only one.
And in some observations upon an article in Blackwood’s Magazine, he says,—
Writing grows a habit, like a woman’s gallantry. There are women who have had no intrigue, but few who have had but one only: so there are millions of men who have never written a book, but few who have written only one.
This idea is also borrowed from La Rochefoucauld:—
On peut trouver des femmes qui n’ont jamais eu de galanterie; mais il est rare d’en trouver qui n’en aient jamais eu qu’une.—Max. 73.
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state,
An hour may lay it in the dust.—Byron: Childe Harold.
Cento si richieggono ad edificare; un solo basta per distruggere tutto.—Muratori’s Annals.
Even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are formed.—Childe Harold.
Yet monsters from thy large increase we find,
Engendered in the slime thou leav’st behind.—Dryden: The Medal.
I am not altogether of such clay
As rots into the souls of those whom I survey.—Childe Harold.
The gods, a kindness I with thanks repay,
Had formed me of another sort of clay.—Churchill.
What exile from himself can flee?
To zones though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where’er I be,
The blight of life,—the demon Thought.—Childe Harold.
Patriæ quis exul se quoque fugit?—Horace: Ode to Grosphus.
Vide also Epist. XI. 28.
To-morrow for the Moon we depart,
But not to-night,—to-night is for the heart.—Byron: The Island.
Nunc vino pellite curas;
Cras ingens iterabimus æquor.—Horace: Ode to Munatius Plancus.
(Now drown your cares in wine;
To-morrow we shall traverse the great brine.)
Dryden, alluding to his work, says,—
When it was only a confused mass of thoughts tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and there either to be chosen or rejected by the judgment.—Rival Ladies (1664).
Byron thus appropriates the idea:—
——As yet ’tis but a chaos
Of darkly brooding thoughts; my fancy is
In her first work, more nearly to the light
Holding the sleeping images of things
For the selection of the pausing judgment.—Doge of Venice, I. 2.
And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
’Tis that I may not weep.—Byron: Don Juan.
Richardson had said, long before,—
Indeed, it is to this deep concern that my levity is owing; for I struggle and struggle, and try to buffet down my cruel reflections as they rise; and when I cannot, I am forced to try to make myself laugh that I may not cry; for one or other I must do: and is it not philosophy carried to the highest pitch for a man to conquer such tumults of soul as I am sometimes agitated by, and in the very height of the storm to quaver out a horse-laugh?
Clarissa Harlowe, Let. 84.
In the Antiquary of Sir Walter Scott, Maggie says to Oldbuck of Monkbarns (ch. xi.):—
It’s no fish ye’re buying, its men’s lives.
Tom Hood, appears to have borrowed this idea in the Song of the Shirt:—
It is not linen you’re wearing out.
But human creatures’ lives.
In Rogers’ poem, Human Life is this couplet describing a good wife:—
A guardian angel o’er his hearth presiding,
Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing.
In the Tatler, No. 49, it is said of a model couple, Amanda and Florio, that “their satisfactions are doubled, their sorrows lessened, by participation.”
Of the buccaneering adventurer described in Rokeby, Sir Walter Scott says:—
Inured to danger’s direst form,
Tornade and earthquake, flood and storm,
Death had he seen by sudden blow,
By wasting plague, by torture slow,
By mine or breach, by steel or ball,
Knew all his shapes and scorned them all.
Sir Walter Raleigh, in a letter to his wife on the eve, as he supposed, of his execution, speaks of himself as “one who, in his own respect, despiseth death in all his misshapen and ugly forms.”
Speaking of Burke, Goldsmith says in his Retaliation:—
Who, born for universe, narrowed his mind,
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.
Pope, in his Last Letter to the Bishop of Rochester, (Atterbury,) said:—
At this time, when you are cut off from a little society and made a citizen of the world at large, you should bend your talents, not to serve a party or a few, but all mankind.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.—Pope.
Nous no jouissons jamais; nous espérons toujours.—Massillon, Sermon pour le Jour de St. Benoit.
The jocular saying of Douglas Jerrold, that a wife of forty should, like a bank-note, be exchangeable for two of twenty, was anticipated by Byron:—
Wedded she was some years, and to a man
Of fifty, and such husbands are in plenty;
And yet, I think, instead of such a one
’Twere better to have two of five-and-twenty.
Don Juan, lxii.
And still earlier by Gay in Equivocation. In the colloquy between a bishop and an abbot, the bishop advises:—
These indiscretions lend a handle
To lewd lay tongues to give us scandal
For your vow’s sake, this rule I give t’ye,
Let all your maids be turned of fifty.
The priest replied, I have not swerved,
But your chaste precept well observed;
That lass full twenty-five has told;
I’ve yet another who’s as old;
Into one sum their ages cast,
So both my maids have fifty past.
Many readers will remember the lines by Burns, commencing:—
The day returns, my bosom burns,
The blissful day we twa did meet;
Though winter wild in tempest toiled,
Ne’er summer morn was half sae sweet.
The turn of thought in this stanza bears a striking resemblance to the concluding lines of Ode cxi., of M. A. Flaminius. The following translation is close enough to point the resemblance:—
When, borne on Zephyr’s balmy wing
Again returns the purple spring
Instant the mead is gay with flowers
The forest smiles, and through its bowers
Once more the song-bird’s tuneful voice
Bids nature everywhere rejoice.
Yet fairer far and far more gay
To me were winter’s darkest day,
So, blessed thenceforth, it should restore
My loved one to my arms once more.
Moore says:—
Let conquerors boast
Their fields of fame—he who in virtue’s arms
A young warm spirit against beauty’s charms
Who feels her brightness, yet defies her thrall
Is the best, bravest conqueror of all.
Howell in the Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ says:—
Alexander subdued the world—Cæsar his enemies—Hercules monsters—but he that overcomes himself is the true valiant captain.
Brutus says, in Shakspeare’s Julius Cæsar, iv., 3:—
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows, and in miseries.
In Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, B. 2, occurs this passage:—
In the third place, I set down reputation, because of the peremptory tides and currents it hath, which, if they be not taken in due time, are seldom recovered, it being extreme hard to play an after game of reputation.
King Henry says, in Shakspeare’s 2 Hen. VI., i. 1:—
O Lord, that lends me life,
Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness.
George Herbert says:—
Thou that hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, a grateful heart.
Vitruvius says:—There are various kinds of timber, as there are various kinds of flesh; one of men, one of fishes, one of beasts, and another of birds.
St. Paul says:—All flesh is not the same flesh, &c., I Cor. xv. 39.
In Coventry Patmore’s delicately beautiful poem, The Angel in the House, twice occurs the line,—
Her pleasure in her power to charm.
“An exquisite line,” says The Critic: “who could have believed that the ugly and often unjust word vanity could ever be melted down into so true and pretty and flattering a periphrasis?” Thackeray uses the same idea:—
A fair young creature, bright and blooming yesterday, distributing smiles, levying homage, inspiring desire, conscious of her power to charm, and gay with the natural enjoyments of her conquests—who, in his walk through the world, has not looked on many such a one? The Newcomes.
E’en the slight hare-bell raised its head,
Elastic from its airy tread. Scott, Lady of the Lake.
For other print her airy steps ne’er left;
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass.
Ben Jonson, The Sad Shepherd.
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Pope, Essay on Criticism.
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxvii.
Magis gauderes quod habueras [amicum], quam mœreres quod amiseras.
Seneca, Epist. cxix.
The familiar epitaphic line,
Think what a woman should be—she was that,
finds a parallel in Shakspeare’s Venus and Adonis:—
Look what a horse should have, he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.
And homeless, near a thousand homes, I stood,
And, near a thousand tables, pined and wanted food.
Wordsworth, Guilt and Sorrow.
Alas for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
Oh, it was pitiful,
Near a whole city full
Home she had none. Hood, Bridge of Sighs.
So that a doubt almost within me springs
Of Providence. Wordsworth, Powers of Imagination.
Even God’s Providence seeming estranged.
Hood, Bridge of Sighs.
Not that man may not here
Taste of the cheer:
But as birds drink, and straight lift up their head;
So must he sip and think
Of better drink
He may attain to after he is dead.
George Herbert, Man’s Medley.
Look at the chicken by the side of yonder pond, and let it rebuke your ingratitude. It drinks, and every sip it takes it lifts its head to heaven and thanks the giver of the rain for the drink afforded to it; while thou eatest and drinkest, and there is no blessing pronounced at thy meals and no thanksgiving bestowed upon thy Father for his bounty.
Spurgeon, Everybody’s Sermon.
Toplady has bequeathed to us the beautiful hymn:—
Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee!
Let the water and the blood,
From thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
But Daniel Brevint in The Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice, (1673) had made this devout and solemn aspiration:—
O Rock of Israel, Rock of Salvation, Rock struck and cleft for me, let those two streams of blood and water, which once gushed out of thy side ... bring down with them salvation and holiness into my soul.
She (the Roman Catholic Church) may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast Solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s. Macaulay, Ranke’s History of the Popes.
The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will perhaps be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveler from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra:—but am I not prophesying contrary to my consummate prudence, and casting horoscopes of empires like Rousseau?
Horace Walpole, Letter to Mason.
Readers of Don Juan sometimes descant with rapture on the beauty of the lines (c. i. v. 123),—
’Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog’s honest bark
Bay deep-mouthed welcome as we draw near home,—
The epithet deep-mouthed, as applied to the bark, being especially designated as “fine.” And fine it is, but Byron found it in Shakspeare and in Goldsmith:—
And couple Clowder with the deep-mouthed brach.
Taming of the Shrew, Induc. Sc. 1.
The laborers of the day were all retired to rest; the lights were out in every cottage; no sounds were heard but of the shrilling cock, and the deep-mouthed watch-dog at hollow distance.
Vicar of Wakefield, ch. xxii.
“Your sermon,” said a great critic to a great preacher, “was very fine; but had it been only half the length, it would have produced twice the impression.” “You are quite right,” was the reply; “but the fact is, I received but sudden notice to preach, and therefore I had not the time to make my sermon short.”
Voltaire apologized for writing a long letter on the ground that he had not time to condense. In these cases the idea is borrowed from classical literature. Pliny says in his Letters (lib. i. ep. xx.):—
Ex his apparet illum permulta dixisse; quum ederet, omisisse; ... ne dubitare possimus, quæ per plures dies, ut necesse erat, latius dixerit, postea recisa ac purgata in unum librum, grandem quidem, unum tamen, coarctasse.
(From this it is evident that he said very much; but, when he was publishing, he omitted much: ... so that we may not doubt that what he said more diffusely, as he was at the time forced to do, having afterwards retrenched and corrected, he condensed into one single book.)
The condensation and revision required more time and thought than the first production.
Campbell says in O’Connor’s Child,—
For man’s neglect we loved it more.
And again, Lines on leaving a Scene in Bavaria,—
For man’s neglect I love thee more.
And Walter Scott likewise imitates himself thus:—
His grasp, as hard as glove of mail,
Forced the red blood drop from the nail.
Rokeby.Cantoi.
He wrung the Earl’s hand with such frantic earnestness, that his grasp
forced the blood to start under the nail.—Legend of Montrose.
In Rob Roy, Sir Walter makes Frank Osbaldistone say in his elegy on Edward the Black Prince,—
O for the voice of that wild horn,
On Fontarabian echoes borne,
The dying hero’s call,
That told imperial Charlemagne,
How Paynim sons of swarthy Spain
Had wrought his champion’s fall.
And in Marmion, toward the close of Canto Sixth, he says:—
O for a blast of that dread horn,
On Fontarabian echoes borne,
That to King Charles did come,
When Rowland brave, and Oliver,
And every paladin and peer,
On Roncesvalles died.
When this inadvertent or unconscious coincidence in the poem and the novel was pointed out to Sir Walter, he replied, with his natural expression of comic gravity, “Ah! that was very careless of me. I did not think I should have committed such a blunder.”
“I tread on the pride of Plato,” said Diogenes, as he walked over Plato’s carpet. “Yes, and with more pride,” said Plato.—Cecil, Remains.
Trampling on Plato’s pride, with greater pride,
As did the Cynic on some like occasion, &c.
Byron, Don Juan, xvi. 43.
Diogenes I hold to be the most vainglorious man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all honors than Alexander in rejecting none.
Browne, Religio Medici.
There is an Italian proverb used, in the extravagance of flattery, to compliment a handsome lady, expressive of this idea:—“When nature made thee, she broke the mould.” Byron uses it in the closing lines of his monody on the death of Sheridan:—
Sighing that Nature formed but one such man,
And broke the die,—in moulding Sheridan.
Shakspeare also says, in the second stanza of Venus and Adonis,—
Nature that made thee, with herself at strife,
Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.
Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas.
(From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but a step.)
This saying, commonly ascribed to Napoleon, was borrowed by him from Tom Paine, whose works were translated into French in 1791, and who says,—
The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.
Tom Paine, in turn, adopted the idea from Hugh Blair, who says, in one place,—
It is indeed extremely difficult to hit the precise point where true wit ends and buffoonery begins.
In another,—
It frequently happens that where the second line is sublime, the third, in which he meant to rise still higher, is perfect bombast.
Finally, Blair borrowed the saying from Longinus, a celebrated Greek critic and rhetorical writer, who, in a Treatise On the Sublime, uses the same expression, with this slight modification, that he makes the transition a gradual one, while Blair, Paine, and Napoleon make it but a step.[[35]]
Evil communications corrupt good manners.—1 Cor. xv. 33.
φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρησθ’ ὁμιλίαι κακαί.—Menander.
Bonos corrumpunt mores congressus mali.—Tertullian: Ad Uxorem.
He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.—Eccl. i. 18.
From ignorance our comfort flows,
The only wretched are the wise.—Prior.
Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.—Gray: Ode to Eton.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.—Pope: On Criticism.
A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.—Bacon: On Atheism.
In Paradise Lost, Book V. 601, we find the expression—
Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers;
and in Book I. 261, this powerful passage put in the mouth of Satan:—
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell;
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
In Stafford’s Niobe, printed when Milton was in his cradle, (1611,) is the following:—
True it is, sir, (said the Devil,) that I, storming at the name of supremacy, sought to depose my Creator; which the watchful, all-seeing eye of Providence finding, degraded me of my angelic dignities—dispossessed me of all pleasures; and the seraphs and cherubs, the Throne, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Princedoms, Arch Angels, and all the Celestial Hierarchy, with a shout of applause, sung my departure out of Heaven. My alleluia was turned into an eheu. Now, forasmuch as I was an Angel of Light, it was the will of Wisdom to confine me to Darkness and make me Prince thereof. So that I, that could not obey in Heaven, might command in Hell; and, believe me, I had rather rule within my dark domain than to re-inhabit Cœlum empyream, and there live in subjection under check, a slave of the Most High.
Cæsar said he would rather be the first man in a village than the second man in Rome.
A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind.—Garrick.
I would help others out of a fellow-feeling.—Burton: Anat. of Mel.
Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco.—Virgil: Æn. I.
And learn the luxury of doing good.—Goldsmith: Traveller.
For all their luxury was doing good.—Garth: Claremont.
He tried the luxury of doing good.—Crabbe: Tales.
The cups that cheer but not inebriate.—Cowper: Winter Evening.
Tar water is of a nature so mild and benign, and proportioned to the human constitution, as to warm without heating, to cheer but not inebriate,—Bishop Berkeley: Siris.
The dome of thought, the palace of the soul.—Byron: Childe Harold.
Tea does our fancy aid,
Repress those vapors which the head invade,
And keeps the palace of the soul.—Waller: On Tea.
None knew thee but to love thee.—Halleck: On Drake.
To know her was to love her.—Rogers: Jacqueline.
Sullen, like lamps in sepulchres, your shine
Enlightens but yourselves.—Blair: Grave.
Dim lights of life, that burn a length of years,
Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres.
Pope: Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.—Gray: Elegy.
And pilgrim, newly on his road, with love
Thrills, if he hear the vesper bell from far,
That seems to mourn for the expiring day.—Dante, Cary’s Trans.
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.—Gray: Elegy.
Yet in our ashen cold is fire yrecken.—Chaucer.
Ἐάσατ’ ἤδη γῇ καλυφθῆναι νεκρόυς,
ὅθεν δ’ ἕκαστον εἰς το ζῇν ἀφίκετο
ἐνταῦθ’ ἀπελθεῖν· ΠΝΕΥΜΑ μὲν πρὸς ἈΙΘΕΡΑ
τὸ σῶμα δ’ εἰς ΓΗΝ.—Euripides: Supplices.
(Let the dead be concealed in the earth, whence each one came forth into being, to return thence again—the spirit to the SPIRIT’S SOURCE, but the body to the EARTH.)
The resemblance between the above and the beautiful expression in the “Preacher’s” homily is very remarkable:—
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.—Eccles. xii. 7.
Ἐπάμεροι, τί δέ τις· τί δ’ οὔ τις·
Σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωποι.—Pindar.
(Things of a day! What is any one? What is he not? Men are the dream of a shadow.)
Man’s life is but a dream—nay, less than so,
A shadow of a dream.—Sir John Davies.
Where highest woods, impenetrable
To sun or starlight, spread their umbrage broad
And brown as evening.—Milton.
The shades of eve come slowly down,
The woods are wrapped in deeper brown.—Scott: Lady of the Lake.
The term brown, applied to the evening shade, is derived from the Italian, the expression “fa l’imbruno” being commonly used in Italy to denote the approach of evening.
’Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore;
And coming events cast their shadows before.
Campbell: Lochiel’s Warning.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.—Shelley: Defence of Poetry.
A similar form of expression occurs in Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, x. 1.
The wolfs long howl by Oonalaska’s shore.
Campbell: Pleasures of Hope.
Stolen from a line in an obscure poem called the Sentimental Sailor:—
The screaming eagle’s shriek that echoes wild,
The wolf’s long howl in dismal concert joined, &c.
Perhaps in some lone, dreary, desert tower
That Time had spared, forth from the window looks,
Half hid in grass, the solitary fox;
While from above, the owl, musician dire,
Screams hideous, harsh, and grating to the ear.
Bruce: Loch Leven.
In the Fragments attributed to Ossian by Baron de Harold, Fingal paints the following beautiful word-picture:—
I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they are desolate: the flames had resounded in the halls, and the voice of the people is heard no more; the stream of Cutha was removed from its place by the fall of the walls; the thistle shoots there its lowly head; the moss whistled to the winds; the fox looked out of the windows, and the rank grass of the walls waved round his head; desolate is the dwelling of Morna: silence is in the house of her fathers.
And again:—
The dreary night owl screams in the solitary retreat of his mouldering ivy-covered tower.—Larnul, the Song of Despair.
The Persian poet quoted by Gibbon also says,—
The spider hath hung with tapestry the palace of the Cæsars; the owl singeth her sentinel-song in the watch-towers of Afrasiab.—Firdousi.
Tell us, ye dead; will none of you in pity
Disclose the secret——
What ’tis you are, and we must shortly be?—Blair: Grave.
The dead! the much-loved dead!
Who doth not yearn to know
The secret of their dwelling-place,
And to what land they go?
What heart but asks, with ceaseless tone,
For some sure knowledge of its own?—Mary E. Lee.
Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as harbingers to heaven; and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sickness-broken body.—Fuller.
The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.
Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.—Waller: Divine Poesie.
Oh! let no mass be sung,
No ritual read;
In silence lay me down
Among the dead.—Heine: Memento Mori.
The great German poet was evidently familiar with Horace:—
Absint inani funere næniæ,
Luctusque turpes et querimoniæ;
Compesce clamorem, ac sepulchri
Mitte supervacuos honores.—Lib. II. Carmen 26.
I am old and blind;
Men point at me as smitten by God’s frown;
Afflicted and deserted of my kind:—
Yet am I not cast down.
I am weak, yet strong;
I murmur not that I no longer see;
Poor, old, and helpless, I the more belong,
Father Supreme, to Thee!
O merciful One!
When men are farthest, then art Thou most near;
When friends pass by—my weaknesses to shun—
Thy chariot I hear.
Thy glorious face
Is leaning toward me, and its holy light
Shines in upon my lonely dwelling-place,
And there is no more night.
On my bended knee
I recognize Thy purpose clearly shown;
My vision Thou hast dimmed that I may see
Thyself, Thyself alone.
I have naught to fear!
This darkness is the shadow of Thy wing:
Beneath it I am almost sacred,—here
Can come no evil thing, &c.—Elizabeth Lloyd.
The resemblance of these lines to the following passage from Milton’s Second Defence of the People of England is so striking that we are inclined to regard them as a paraphrase:—
Let me then be the most feeble creature alive, so long as that feebleness serves to invigorate the energies of my rational and immortal spirit, so long as in that obscurity in which I am enveloped the light of Divine Presence more clearly shines. Then in proportion as I am weak, I shall be invincibly strong; and in proportion as I am blind, I shall more clearly see. Oh that I may thus be perfected by feebleness, and irradiated by obscurity! And indeed in my blindness I enjoy in no inconsiderable degree the favor of the Deity, who regards me with more tenderness and compassion in proportion as I am able to behold nothing but himself. Alas for him who insults me, who maligns and merits public execration! For the divine law not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack,—not indeed so much from the privation of my sight, as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seem to have occasioned this obscurity, and which, when occasioned, he is wont to illuminate with an interior light more precious and more pure.
In Keble’s lines for “St. John’s Day” occurs this stanza:—
Sick or healthful, slave or free,
Wealthy or despised and poor,
What is that to him or thee,
So his love to Christ endure?
When the shore is won at last,
Who will count the billows past?
The first four lines resemble a stanza of Wither, one of the Roundhead poets (1632):—
Whether thrallèd or exiled,
Whether poor or rich thou be,
Whether praisèd or reviled,
Not a rush it is to thee:
This nor that thy rest doth win thee.
But the mind that is within thee.
And the last two lines recall Robert Burns, who had said in his song commencing Contented wi little, and cantie wi mair:—
When at the blithe end of our journey at last,
Wha the deil ever thinks o’ the road he has passed?
Two centuries before Burns, Tasso said in his Gerusalemme Liberata (iii. 4):—
Cosi di naviganti, etc.
... e l’uno all ’altro il mostra e intanto oblia
La noja e il mal della passata via.
Or as Fairfax renders it:—
As when a troop of jolly sailors row, etc.
And each to other show the land in haste,
Forgetting quite their pains and perils past.
And before dismissing “the billows past,” it is worth while to quote the following passage from Spenser’s Faery Queene (I. 9. 40):—
What if some little pain the passage have
That makes frail flesh to fear the bitter wave?
Is not short pain well borne that brings long ease,
And lays the soul to sleep in quiet grave?
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.
Lucretius says:—
At jam non domus accipiet te læta; neque uxor
Optima, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati
Præripere, et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent.
(No longer shall thy joyous home receive thee, nor yet thy best of wives, nor shall thy sweet children run to be the first to snatch thy kisses and thrill thy breast with silent delight.)
Compare Gray’s Elegy:—
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
And Thomson’s Seasons (Winter):—
In vain for him th’ officious wife prepares
The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm;
In vain his little children, peeping out
Into the mingled storm, demand their sire,
With tears of artless innocence. Alas!
Nor wife, nor children, more shall he behold,
Nor friends, nor sacred home.
The famous speech of Wolsey after his fall—
Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.—
Henry VIII., iii. 2.
finds a counterpart in a satire of the Persian poet Ferdousi on the Arabian impostor:—
Had I but written as many verses in praise of Mahomet and Allah, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.
It also finds a parallel in a passage from Ockley’s History of the Saracens—AN. Hegira 54, A. D. 673—
This year Moawiyah deposed Samrah, deputy over Basorah. As soon as Samrah heard this news, he said—“God curse Moawiyah. If I had served God so well as I have served him, he would never have damned me to all eternity.”
Our hearts——
——are beating.—
Funeral marches to the grave.—
Longfellow, Psalm of Life.
Our lives are but our marches to our graves.—
Beaumont and Fletcher, Humorous Lieutenant.
Next these learned Johnson in this list I bring,
Who had drunk deep of the Pierian spring.—Drayton.
A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.—Pope.
Socrates said to some Sophists, who pretended to know everything, “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.”
Owen Feltham, in his Resolves (Curiosity in Knowledge) remarks:—
Our knowledge doth but show us our ignorance. Our most studious scrutiny is but a discovery of what we cannot know.
Voltaire, in the Histoire d’un bon Bramin says:—
Le Bramin me dit un jour: Je voudrais n’être jamais né. Je lui demandai pourquoi. Il me répondit: J’étudie depuis quarante ans; ce sont quarante années de perdues; j’enseigne les autres, et j’ignore tout.
These lines will remind the reader of the opening soliloquy of Faust in Goethe’s immortal tragedy. Bayard Taylor’s translation commences as follows:—
I’ve studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,—
And even, alas! Theology,—
From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before:
I’m Magister—yea, Doctor—hight,
And straight or cross-wise, wrong or right,
These ten years long, with many woes,
I’ve led my scholars by the nose,—
And see, that nothing can be known!
In The Last Days of Pompeii (ch. v.) Glaucus, the Athenian, is made to say:—
“I am as one who is left alone at a banquet, the lights dead, and the flowers faded.”
Of course, Bulwer Lytton was familiar with Oft in the Stilly Night, which Moore had written twenty years before:—
I feel like one who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed.
Dr. Johnson said that “no one does anything for the last time (knowingly) but with regret.”
In Bishop Hall’s Holy Observations (xxvij) is this passage:—
“Nothing is more absurd than that Epicurean resolution, ‘Let us eat and drink, to-morrow we die’; as if we were made only for the paunch, and lived that we might live. Yet has there never any natural man found savour in that meat which he knew should be his last; whereas they should say: Let us fast and pray, for to-morrow we shall die.”