Fuller, Poem on David’s hainous Sin.
Great is the wit of pensiveness, and when the head is racked
With hard misfortune sharp forecast of practice entereth in.
Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, b. vi.
What is care and thought? a plain token of diffidence and distrust of God. It is an unfaithful care and pensiveness of the mind for meat, drink, clothing.—Becon, Works, vol. iii. p. 611.
Penury. This expresses now no more than the objective fact of extreme poverty; an ethical subjective meaning not lying in it, as would sometimes of old. This is now retained only in ‘penurious,’ ‘penuriousness.’
God sometimes punishes one sin with another; pride with adultery, drunkenness with murder, carelessness with irreligion, idleness with vanity, penury with oppression.—Bishop Taylor, The Faith and Patience of the Saints.
[Perseverance. This word frequently occurs in literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the sense of perception, discernment. ‘Perseverance’=discernment should be carefully distinguished from ‘perseverance’ (French perseverance, Latin perseverantia)=persistency, constancy. The former in many texts is spelt with a c instead of an s, as ‘perceverance,’ ‘perceyverance,’ ‘perceiverance.’ This spelling gives the key to the etymology; the word is a derivative from Old French percevoir, percever=Latin percipere, to perceive. For a good collection of illustrative passages see Notes and Queries (1st S. vii. 400.)]
If the dead have anie perceverance.
Golding (see N. and Q.)