Doth not rosemary and Romeo begin both with a letter? ROMEO AND JULIET ii. 4.

ΑΝΤ

ND it could not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal palaces; but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility; and it went with a lame gait; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelic bosoms; and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the immortal lame one.

CHARLES LAMB,

HUSH! my heedless feet from under
Slip the crumbling banks for ever:
Like echoes to a distant thunder,

They plunge into the gentle river.
The river-swans have heard my tread,
And startle from their reedy bed.
O beauteous birds, methinks ye measure
Your movements to some heavenly tune!
O beauteous birds! 'tis such a pleasure
To see you move beneath the moon,

I would it were your true delight
To sleep by day and wake all night.

COLERIDGE,

I

Ditties highly penn'd

Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower,
With ravishing division, to her lute.

I KING HENRY IV. iii. J.

BELIEVE I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse, as have never since left ringing there; for I remember, when I began to read, and take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion ;) but there was wont to lie Spenser's Works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights and giants, and monsters, and brave horses which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this); and by degrees, with the tinkling of the rhyme, and dance of the numbers, so that I had read him all before 'I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet.

COWLEY.

To his sweet lute Apollo sang the motions of the spheres,

The wondrous order of the stars whose course

divides the years,

And all the mysteries above;

But none of this could Midas move:

Which purchased him his ass's ears.

CAMPION.

If I had my liberty, I would do my liking.

MUCH ADO i. 3.

THERE is written on the Turrets of the City of

Luca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS: Yet no man can thence infer, that a particular man has more Liberty, or Immunity from the service of the Commonwealth there, than in Constantinople.

HOBBES.

SEEING this vale, this earth, on which we dream Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high

Uno'erleap'd mountains of Necessity,

Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,

We wawl, and cry.

KING LEAR iv. 6.

THE

HE Thracians wept when a child was born, and feasted and made merry when a man

went out of the world, and with reason.

Is it not

Not to

better not to hunger at all, than to eat? thirst, than to take physic to cure it? Is it not better to be freed from cares and agues, love and melancholy, and all the other hot and cold fits of life, than, like a galled traveller, who comes weary to his inn, to be bound to begin his journey afresh?

In this world, the Isle of Dreams,
While we sit by sorrow's streams,
Tears and terrors are our themes

Reciting.

STERNE.

HERRICK.

Put out the light, and then-put out the light.

OTHELLO V. 2.

SOLEMN indeed is the place, solemn and

strangely suggestive, for the simple reason

that we shall scarcely find four walls elsewhere that enclose within a like area an equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it, and dense and difficult to breathe; for it was genius that was not happy, inasmuch as it lacked the art to fix itself for ever. It is not immortality that we breathe at the Scuola di San Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality.

HENRY JAMES.

-WHAT Would one have?

In heaven, perhaps, more chances, one more

chance,

Four great walls in the new Jerusalem

Meted on each side by the angel's reed,

For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me

To cover

BROWNING.