While pensive poets painful vigils keep – Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep.
Alexander Pope Quotes
Such were the notes thy once loved poet sung, Till death untimely stopped his tuneful tongue. (to Robert, Earl of Oxford)
Is there a parson much bemused in beer, A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer, A clerk foredoomed his father’s soul to cross, Who pens a stanza when he should engross?
Call, if you will, bad rhyming a disease, It gives men happiness, or leaves them ease.
Means not, but blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian’s so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad.
Ask where’s the North? At York tis on the Tweed; In Scotland at the Orcades; and there, At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where.
A man of business may talk of philosophy; a man who has none may practice it.
On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale.
And hence one master – passion in the breast, Like Aaron’s serpent, swallows up the rest.
The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still.
