The mahogany tables, all, but especially the large dining-table, [marked] with the segments of circles (deep according to the passion of the dice-box plunger), chiefly half-circles, O the anger and spite with which many have been thrown! It is truly a written history of the fiendish passion of gambling. Oct. 12, 1806. Newmarket.
PINDAR
The odes of Pindar (with few exceptions, and these chiefly in the shorter ones) seem by intention to die away by soft gradations into a languid interest, like most of the landscapes of the great elder painters. Modern ode-writers have commonly preferred a continued rising of interest.
"ONE MUSIC AS BEFORE, BUT VASTER"
The shattering of long and deep-rooted associations always places the mind in an angry state, and even when our own understandings have effected the revolution, it still holds good, only we apply the feeling to and against our former faith and those who still hold it—[a tendency] shown in modern infidels. Great good, therefore, of such revolution as alters, not by exclusion, but by an enlargement that includes the former, though it places it in a new point of view.
TO ALLSTON
After the formation of a new acquaintance, found, by some weeks' or months' unintermitted communion, worthy of all our esteem, affection and, perhaps, admiration, an intervening absence, whether we meet again or only write, raises it into friendship, and encourages the modesty of our nature, impelling us to assume the language and express all the feelings of an established attachment.