The British Essayists, Volume 35

Front Cover
Alexander Chalmers
J. Johnson, 1807

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Page 170 - Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling...
Page 170 - tis too horrible ! The weariest and most loathed worldly life, That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death.
Page 93 - I was once myself in agonies of grief that are unutterable, and in so great a distraction of mind, that I thought myself even out of the possibility of receiving comfort. The occasion was as follows : When I was a youth, in a part of the army which was then quartered at Dover, I fell in love with an agreeable young woman, of a good family in those parts, and had the satisfaction of seeing my addresses kindly received, which occasioned the perplexity I am going to relate. We were in a calm evening...
Page 136 - I; and at last, after completing his seventh year, was seized with a fever, which, in a few days, put an end to his life, and transferred to me the inheritance of my ancestors.
Page 251 - O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown ! The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword ; The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, The observed of all observers...
Page 126 - And wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse, contemplation, She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i...
Page 87 - Clouds interpose, waves roar, and winds arise. I shriek, start up, the same sad prospect find, And wake to all the griefs I left behind. For thee the fates, severely kind...
Page 167 - Were I a father, I should take a particular care to preserve my children from these little horrors of imagination, which they are apt to contract when they are young, and are not able to shake off when they are in years.
Page 251 - Feeling, was, it would seem, the first of our critics to feel the 'indescribable charm' of • Hamlet, and to divine something of Shakespeare's / intention. ' We see a man,' he writes, ' who in other circumstances would have exercised all the moral and social virtues, placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities of his mind serve but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.
Page 307 - ... surprised to find how little there is in it either of natural feeling or real satisfaction. Many a fashionable voluptuary, who has not totally blunted his taste or his judgment, will own, in the intervals of recollection, how often he has suffered from the insipidity or the pain of his enjoyments ; and that, if it were not for the fear of being laughed at, it were sometimes worth while, even on the score of pleasure, to be virtuous.

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