DESPONDENCY - DETERMINATION - DETRACTION-DEW.
The recollection of one upward hour
Hath more in it to tranquillize and cheer The darkness of despondency, than years Of gayety and pleasure.
My heart is very tired - my strength is low —
My hands are full of blossoms pluck'd before,
Held dead within them till myself shall die.
Miss Barrett.
It may be that I shall forget my grief;
It may be time has good in store for me;
It may be that my heart will find relief
From sources now unknown. Futurity
May bear within its folds some hidden spring
From which will issue blessed streams; and yet
Whate'er of joy the coming year may bring,
The past the past I never can forget.
And if despondency weigh down
Thy spirit's fluttering pinions, then
thy name is written on
'Tis not the wholesome sharp morality, Or modest anger of a satiric spirit,
That hurts or wounds the body of a state;
But the sinister application
Of the malicious, ignorant, and base
Interpreter; who will distort, and strain
The gen'ral scope and purpose of an author,
To his particular and private spleen.
Jonson's Poetasier. Who stabs my name, would stab my person too, Did not the hangman's axe lie in the way.
Crown's Henry VII. Happy are they that hear their detractions, And can put them to mending.
Detraction's a bold monster, and fears not
To wound the fame of princes, if it find
But any blemish in their lives to work on.
Massinger.
To you I shall no trophy raise
From other men's detraction or dispraise:
That jewel never had inherent worth,
Which ask'd such foils as these to set it forth.
Bishop King
And that same dew, which sometimes on the buds
Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flow'rets' eyes,
Like tears, that did their own disgrace bewail.
Shaks. Midsummer Night's Dream.
I must go seek some dew-drops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
Shaks. Midsummer Night's Dream.
DEVOTION-DIGNITY-DINNER-DISAPPOINTMENT-DISCONTENT.
Great honours are great burdens: but, on whom
They're cast with envy, he doth bear two loads;
His cares must still be double to his joys,
In any dignity; where, if he err,
He finds no pardon; and, for doing well,
A most small praise, and that wrung out by force.
Jonson's Catiline
True dignity is never gained by place,
Miss Barrett. And never lost when honours are withdrawn.
The hand is rais'd, the pledge is given,
One monarch to obey, one creed to own,
That monarch, God; that creed, His word alone.
Sprague.
Like earth, awake, and warm, and bright
With joy the spirit moves and burns;
So up to thee! O Fount of Light!
I know myself now, and I feel within me
A peace above all earthly dignities;
O thoughts of men accurs'd!
Past and to come, seem best; things present, worst.
Shaks. Henry IV. Part Il.
Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehav'd and sullen wench,
Thou poutest upon thy fortune and thy love:
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.
Shaks. Henry IV. Part II.
He reads much;
He is a good observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music:
Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort,
As if he mock'd himself, and scorn'd his spirit
That could be mov'd to smile at any thing.
Shaks. Julius Cæsar.
She is peevish, sullen, froward,
Proud, disobedient, stubborn, lacking duty;
Neither regarding that she is my child,
Nor fearing me as if I were her father.
Shaks. Two Gentlemen of Verona.
A still and quiet conscience. The king has cur'd Worthy Montano, you were wont to be civil;
Did I request thec, maker, from my clay
To mould me man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me, or here place
In this delicious garden? as my will
Concurr'd not to my being, it were but right
And equal to reduce me to my dust,
Desirous to resign and render back
All I receiv'd unable to perform
Thy terms so hard, by which I was to hold
The good I sought not.
Milton's Paradise Lost.
Sour discontent that quarrels with our fate,
May give fresh smart, but not the old abate;
The uneasy passion's disingenuous wit,
The ill reveals, but hides the benefit.
Sir Richard Blackmore.
Burns. Whose steady radiance changes not,
Though thousands kneel afar.
I cannot bear to be with men
Who only see my weaknesses;
Who know not what I might have been,
DISHONESTY.- (See THIEVES.)
But scan my spirit as it is.
Thus darkly o'er the cares that swell
Life's current to a flood.
As brooks, and corrents, rivers, ail
ncrease the gulf in which they fall,
DISPOSITION.-(See CHARACTER.)
His name was Doubt, that had a double face,
Th' one forward looking, th' other backward bent,
Therein resembling Janus auncient,
Which had in charge the ingate of the year:
And evermore his eyes about him went,
As if some proved peril he did fear,
Or did misdoubt some ill, whose cause did not
appear.
Spenser's Fairy Queen.
"T is good to doubt the worst, We may in our belief be too secure. Webster's and Rowley's Thracian Wonder.
Known mischiefs have their cure, but doubts have none;
And better is despair than fruitless hope
What though the world has whisper'd thee, Be
Thou dost not dream of change. Nay, do not speak,
For any answer would imply a doubt
In love's deep confidence, which not for worlds Should have existence.
The clear, cold question chills to frozen doubt;
Tired of beliefs, we dread to live without;
O then, if reason waver at thy side,
Let humbler Memory be thy gentle guide,
Go to thy birth-place, and, if faith was there,
Repeat thy father's creed, thy mother's prayer.
Yet do not think I doubt thee,
I know thy truth remains; I would not live without thee, For all the world contains.
G. P. Morris. Beware of doubt-faith is the subtle chain Which binds us to the infinite: the voice Of a deep life within, that will remain Until we crowd it thence.
Dreams are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;
Which is as thin of substance as the air,
And more inconstant than the wind.
Shaks. Romeo and Juliet.
If I may trust the flattering eye of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand;
My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne;
And all this day, an unaccustom'd spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts
Shaks. Romeo and Juliet
Ah me! how sweet is love itself possess'd,
When but love's shadows are so rich in joy!
Shaks. Romeo and Juliet.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow,
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream:
And in thy face strange motions have appear'd,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden haste.
Shaks. Henry IV. Part 1
Dreams are toys:
Yof, for this once, yea, superstitiously,
I will fre squar'd by this.
Dreams are but interludes which fancy makes;
When monarch reason sleeps, this mimic wakes:
Compounds a medley of disjointed things,
A mob of cobblers, and a court of kings:
Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad;
Both are the reasonable soul run mad:
And many monstrous forms in sleep we see,
That neither were, nor are, nor e'er can be.
Sometimes forgotten things long cast behind
Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind.
The nurse's legends are for truths received,
And the man dreams but what the boy believed.
But dreams full oft are found of real events
The forms and shadows.
Joanna Baillie's Ethwald.
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
Huri'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled
pool;
Or scal'd the cliff, or danc'd on hollow winds,
With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain?
Her ceaseless flight, though devious, speaks her
Of subtler essence than the trodden clod;-
For human weal, heaven husbands all events,
He sleeps, if it be sleep; this starting trance,
Whose feverish tossings and deep mutter'd groans
Do prove the soul shares not the body's rest-
How the lip works, how the bare teeth do grind,
And beaded drops course down his writhen brow!
Maturin's Bertram.
Lightly he dreamt as youth will dream,
Of sport by thicket, or by stream,
Of hawk, of hound, of ring, of glove,
Or lighter yet-of lady's love.
Our waking dreams are fatal: how I dreamt,
Of things impossible! (could sleep do more ?)
Of joys perpetual in perpetual change!
Of stable pleasures on the tossing wave!
Eternal sunshine in the storms of life!
How richly were my noon-tide trances hung
With gorgeous tapestries of pictur'd joys!
Joy behind joy, in endless perspective!
Till at death's toll, whose restless iron tongue
Calls daily for his millions at a meal,
Starting I woke, and found myself undone.
Dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past, they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power—
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not-what they
will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanish'd shadows-Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? what are they?
Creations of the mind? the mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
Byron's Dream
O Spirit Land! thou land of dreams!
A world thou art of mysterious gleams,
Of startling voices and sounds of strife,
A world of the dead in the hues of life.
Mrs. Hemans's Poems.
I walk with sweet friends in the sunset glow;
I listen to music of long ago;
But one thought, like an omen, breathes faint
through the lay,—
Dull sleep instructs, nor sport vain dreams in vain. "It is but a dream; it will melt away."
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