Or learn to bear with grace his tragic part.”
The old English proverb, “Building is a sweet impoverishing,” has its prototype in the couplet:—
“The broad highway to poverty and need
Is much to build and many mouths to feed.”
But a second strikes the imagination as equally native and verdant, from the supreme faculty which is resident in men of first-rate genius of maintaining their proximity to each successive age:—
“The Muses to Herodotus one day
Came, nine of them, and dined;
And in return, their host to pay,
Each left a book behind.”
It cannot be predicated of what follows that the lapse of years has impaired its application:—