A thousand years a poor man watched
Before the gate of Paradise:
But while one little nap he snatched,
It oped and shut. Ah! was he wise?
Oriental Poetry: Swift Opportunity. W.R. ALGER.
Defend me, therefore, common sense, say I,
From reveries so airy, from the toil
Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up.
Task, Bk. III. W. COWPER.
Like Dead Sea fruit that tempts the eye,
But turns to ashes on the lips!
Lalla Rookh: The Fire Worshippers. T. MOORE.
Like to the apples on the Dead Sea's shore,
All ashes to the taste.
Childe Harold, Canto III. LORD BYRON.
At threescore winters' end I died,
A cheerless being, sole and sad;
The nuptial knot I never tied,
And wish my father never had.
From the Greek. W. COWPER'S Trans.
The cold—the changed—perchance the dead—anew,
The mourned, the loved, the lost—too many!—yet how few!
Childe Harold, Canto IV. LORD BYRON.
Do not drop in for an after-loss.
Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquered woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
Sonnet XC. SHAKESPEARE.
I have not loved the world, nor the world me.
Childe Harold, Canto III. LORD BYRON.
DISCONTENT.
Past and to come seem best; things present worst.
King Henry IV., Pt. II. Act i. Sc. 3. SHAKESPEARE.