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Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard;
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then, the justice;
In fair round belly, with good capon lined,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon ;
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side;
His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness, and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing

2. YOUNG HAMLET, ON SEEING HIS FATHER'S GHOST.

ANGELS and ministers of grace defend us!

Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd,

Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked, or charitable,

Thou com'st in such a questionable shape,

That I will speak to thee; I'll call thee, Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me:
Let me not burst in ignorance! but tell,
Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements! why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urn'd,
Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again? What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again, in complete steel,
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature,
So horridly to shake our disposition,

With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?

3. OPHELIA'S DROWNING.

THERE is a willow grows ascant the brook,
That shews his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them :
There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;

When down her weedy trophies, and herself,
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time, she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indu'd

Unto that element: but long it could not be,
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

4. SOLILOQUY ON DEATH.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die to sleep —
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to :-'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die—to sleep;

-

To sleep! perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: - There's the respect,
That makes calamity of so long life:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself, might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary
life;
But that the dread of something after death,-
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns,- puzzles the will;
And makes us rather bear the ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of!
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

A WINTER SCENE.-Thomson.

As thus the snows arise; and foul, and fierce,
All winter drives along the darkened air;
In his own loose revolving fields, the swain
Disastered stands: sees other hills ascend,
Of unknown joyless brow; and other scenes,
Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain:
Nor finds the river, nor the forest, hid
Beneath the formless wild: but wanders on
From hill to dale, still more and more astray;
Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps,
Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of home
Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth
In many a vain attempt. How sinks his soul !
What black despair, what horror fills his heart!
When for the dusky spot, which fancy feigned
His tufted cottage rising through the snow,
He meets the roughness of the middle waste,
Far from the track, and blessed abode of man;
While round him night resistless closes fast,
And every tempest howling o'er his head,
Renders the savage wilderness more wild.
Then throng the busy shapes into his mind,
Of covered pits unfathomably deep,

A dire descent! beyond the power of frost;
Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge,

Smoothed up with snow; and, what is land unknown,
What water, of the still unfrozen spring,

In the loose marsh, or solitary lake,

Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils.
These check his fearful steps: and down he sinks
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death,
Mixed with the tender anguish Nature shoots
Through the wrung bosom of the dying man,
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen.
In vain for him the officious wife prepares
The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm;
In vain his little children, peeping out
Into the mingling storm, demand their sire,
With tears of artless innocence. Alas!
Nor wife, nor children more shall he behold,
Nor friends, nor sacred home. On every nerve
The deadly Winter seizes; shuts up sense;
And, o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the snows a stiffened corse,
Stretched out, and bleaching in the northern blast.

REFLECTIONS AT MIDNIGHT.—Young.

THE bell strikes One. We take no note of time
But from its loss: to give it then a tongue

Is wise in man.

As if an angel spoke

I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,
It is the knell of my departed hours.

Where are they? With the years beyond the flood.
It is the signal that demands dispatch:

How much is to be done! My hopes and fears
Start up alarm'd, and o'er life's narrow verge
Look down -on what? A fathomless abyss.
A dread eternity! how surely mine!
And can eternity belong to me,

Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?

How

poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!
How passing wonder He who made him such!
Who center'd in our make such strange extremes,
From different natures marvellously mix'd,
Connexion exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguish'd link in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the deity!
A beam ethereal, sullied and absorpt!
Though sullied and dishonor'd, still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute!
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!

A worm! a god! I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost. At home a stranger,
Thought wanders up and down, surpris'd aghast,
And wondering at her own. How reason reels!
O what a miracle to man is man!

Triumphantly distress'd! what joy! what dread!
Alternately transported and alarm'd;

What can preserve my life! or what destroy!
An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave;
Legions of angels can't confine me there.

'Tis past conjecture; all things rise in proof.
While o'er my limbs Sleep's soft dominion spread,
What though my soul fantastic measures trod
O'er fairy fields, or mourn'd along the gloom
Of pathless woods, or down the craggy steep
Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool,
Or scal'd the cliff, or danced on hollow winds
With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain!
Her ceaseless flight, though devious, speaks her nature
Of subtler essence than the trodden clod;

Active, aerial, towering, unconfin'd,
Unfetter'd with her gross companion's fall.
Ev'n silent night proclaims my soul immortal;
Ev'n silent night proclaims eternal day!

For human weal Heaven husbands all events:
Dull sleep instructs, nor sport vain dreams in vain.

Why then their loss deplore, that are not lost?
Why wanders wretched Thought their tombs around
In infidel distress? Are angels there?

Slumbers, rak'd up in dust, ethereal fire?

They live! they greatly live a life, on earth
Unkindled, unconceiv'd, and from an eye
Of tenderness let heavenly pity fall
On me, more justly number'd with the dead.
This is the desert, this the solitude :
How populous, how vital is the grave!
This is Creation's melancholy vault.
The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom;
The land of apparitions, empty shades!
All, all on earth is shadow, all beyond
Is substance; the reverse is Folly's creed.

How solid all, where change shall be no more!

TENDENCY OF ALL THINGS TO DECAY.-Armstrong.

WHAT does not fade? The tower that long had stood
The crush of thunder and the warring winds,
Shook by the slow but sure destroyer Time,
Now hangs in doubtful ruins o'er its base.
And flinty pyramids, and walls of brass,
Descend: the Babylonian spires are sunk;
Achaia, Rome, and Egypt, moulder down.
Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones,
And tottering empires rush by their own weight.
This huge rotundity we tread, grows old;
And all those worlds that roll around the sun,
The sun himself, shall die; and ancient Night
Again involve the desolate abyss:

Till the great FATHER through the lifeless gloom
Extend his arm to light another world,

And bid new planets roll by other laws.
For through the regions of unbounded space,
Where unconfin'd Omnipotence has room,
Being, in various systems, fluctuates still'

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