C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Denham

Be just in all thy actions, and if join’d

With those that are not, never change thy mind.

Expect not more from servants than is just;

Reward them well, if they observe their trust,

Nor with them cruelty or pride invade;

Since God and nature them our brothers made.

I can no more believe old Homer blind,

Than those who say the sun hath never shin’d;

The age therein he liv’d was dark, but he

Could not want sight who taught the world to see.

In age to wish for youth is full as vain

As for a youth to turn a child again.

Not from gray hairs authority doth flow,

Nor from bald heads, nor from a wrinkled brow;

But our past life, when virtuously spent,

Must to our age those happy fruits present.

O happiness of sweet retir’d content!

To be at once secure and innocent.

O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;

Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.

O, happiness of blindness! now no beauty

Inflames my lust; no other’s goods my envy,

Or misery my pity; no man’s wealth

Draws my respect; nor poverty my scorn,

Yet still I see enough! man to himself

Is a large prospect, raised above the level

Of his low creeping thoughts; if then I have

A world within myself, that would shall be

My empire; there I’ll reign, commanding freely,

And willingly obey’d, secure from fear

Of foreign forces, or domestic treasons.

’T is in worldly accidents,

As in the world itself, where things most distant

Meet one another: Thus the east and west,

Upon the globe a mathematical point

Only divides: Thus happiness and misery,

And all extremes, are still contiguous.

When any great design thou dost intend,

Think on the means, the manner, and the end.

Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.

Poesy is of so subtle a spirit that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Such was the force of his eloquence, to make the hearers more concerned than he that spake.