How fierce in fight, with courage undecay'd!
Here too dwells simple truth; plain inno- Judge if such warriors want immortal aid.
Unsullied beauty; sound unbroken youth, Patient of labour, with a little pleased; Health ever blooming; unambitious toil;
Hope arms their courage; from their tow'rs they throw
Calm contemplation; and poetic ease.
Their darts with double force, and drive the foe. DRYDEN.
To fasten in our thoughts that they have Feel darts and charms, attracts and flames,
COWARDICE.—COХСОМВ.—CREATION.
Or sooner understood the sign to fly:
With such alacrity they bore away,
As if, to praise them, all the States stood by.
DRYDEN.
When desperate ills demand a speedy cure,
Distrust is cowardice, and prudence folly.
DR. JOHNSON: Irene.
Fear is my vassal; when I frown, he flies:
A hundred times in life a coward dies.
MARSTON: Insatiate Countess.
Cowards fear to die; but courage stout,
Rather than live in snuff, will be put out.
SIR W. RALEIGH:
On the Snuff of a Candle.
Thou runaway! thou coward! art thou fled? Speak in some bush; where dost thou hide thy
![[blocks in formation]](https://books.google.com.ph/books/content?id=KZ4UAAAAYAAJ&output=html_text&pg=PA111&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&q=death&cds=1&sig=ACfU3U2qnIJhAIJ_R7X9bIFYEYYJFKssnA&edge=0&edge=stretch&ci=42,772,422,734)
Does it not all mechanic heads confound,
That troops of atoms from all parts around,
Of equal number and of equal force,
Should to this single point direct their course,
That so the counter-pressure ev'ry way,
Of equal vigour, might their motions stay,
And by a steady poise the whole in quiet lay?
SIR R. BLACKMORE.
Should we the long-depending scale ascend,
Of sons and fathers will it never end?
If 'twill, then must we through the order run
To some one man whose being ne'er begun:
If that one man was sempiternal, why
Did he, once independent, ever die?
Had not the Maker wrought the springy frame,
Such as it is, to fan the vital flame,
The blood, defrauded of its nitrous food,
Had cool'd and languish'd in th' arterial road;
While the tired heart had strove, with fruitless
pain,
To push the lazy tide along the vein.
SIR R. BLACKMORE.
Could atoms, which, with undirected flight, Roam'd through the void, and ranged the realms of night,
In order march, and to their posts advance,
Led by no guide but undesigning chance?
Besides materials, which are brute and blind, Did not this work require a knowing mind, Who for the task should fit detachments choose From all the atoms.
How could this noble fabric be design'd,
And fashion'd by a maker brute and blind?
Could it of art such miracles invent?
And raise a beauteous world of such extent?
SIR R. BLACKMORE.
Unconscious causes only still impart
Their utmost skill, their utmost power exert:
Those which can freely choose, discern, and
know,
Can more or less of art and care bestow.
SIR R. BLACKMORE.
Ve sons of art, one curious piece devise,
From whose construction motion shall arise.
SIR R. BLACKMORE.
Did chymic chance the furnaces prepare,
Raise all the labour-houses of the air,
And lay crude vapours in digestion there?
See plastic nature, working to this end!
The single atoms each to other tend;
Attract, attracted to, the next in place,
Form'd and impell'd its neighbour to embrace.
Then various elements against thee join'd,
In one more various animal combined,
And framed the clam'rous race of busy human
kind.
Who taught the nations of the field and wood
To shun their poison, and to choose their food?
Prescient, the tides or tempests to withstand,
Build on the wave, or arch beneath the sand?
POPE.
And if each system in gradation roll,
Alike essential to the amazing whole,
The least confusion but in one, not all
That system only, but the whole must fall.
Then from whate'er we can to sense produce,
Common and plain, or wondrous and abstruse,
From Nature's constant or eccentric laws,
The thoughtful soul this gen'ral inference draws,
That an effect must presuppose the cause.
He, sole in power, at the beginning said,
Let sea and air, and earth, and heav'n be made;
And it was so: and when he shall ordain
In other sort, has but to speak again,
And they shall be no more.
While she does her upward flight sustain,
Touching each link of the continued chain,
At length she is obliged and forced to see
A first, a source, a life, a deity.
Heaven, sure, has kept this spot of earth
To show how all things were created first.
This writer's want of sense arraign,
Treat all his empty pages with disdain,
And think a grave reply misspent in vain.
SIR R. BLACKMORE.
These, with the pride of dogmatizing schools,
Imposed on nature arbitrary rules;
Forced her their vain inventions to obey,
And move as learned frenzy traced the way.
SIR R. BLACKMORE.
Brimful of learning, see that pedant stride,
Bristling with horrid Greek, and puff'd with
pride!
A thousand authors he in vain has read,
And with their maxims stuff'd his empty head;
And thinks that without Aristotle's rule
A mind which through each part infused doth Reason is blind, and common sense a fool.
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