Celebrated Friendships, Volume 2

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Page 207 - AWAKE, my St John ! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die...
Page 90 - He always made the best pun, and the best remark in the course of the evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half a dozen half-sentences as he does. His jests scald like tears: and he probes a question with a play upon words.
Page 81 - Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee — the dark pillar not yet turned — Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Logician, Metaphysician, Bard...
Page 9 - I will report no other wonder than this, that, though I lived with him and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man ; with such staidness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above greater years ; his talk ever of knowledge, and his very play tending to enrich his mind...
Page 213 - But we may, nay, (if we will follow nature, and do not work up imagination against her plainest dictates,) we shall of course grow every year more indifferent to life, and to the affairs and interests of a system out of which we are soon to go. This is much better than stupidity. The decay of passion strengthens philosophy, for passion may decay, and stupidity not succeed. Passions (says Pope, our Divine, as you will see one time or other) are the Gales of life : let us not complain that they do...
Page 199 - Thames, you see through my arch up a walk of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple, wholly composed of shells in the rustic manner...
Page 80 - My gentle-hearted Charles ! when the last rook Beat its straight path along the dusky air Homewards, I blest it!
Page 81 - O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces!
Page 289 - ... the attainder of his father. He was a man of a very extraordinary person and presence, which drew the eyes of all men upon him, which were more fixed by a wonderful graceful behaviour, a flowing courtesy and civility, and such a volubility of language, as surprised and delighted...
Page 55 - Throughout a long-drawn summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear and musical, tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonising all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of terror to the imagination ; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind, that you might, for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of conversion.

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