The Works of John Dryden: Now First Collected in Eighteen Volumes, Volume 5

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A. Constable & Company, 1821

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Page 291 - The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them...
Page 321 - Errors like Straws upon the surface flow; He who would search for Pearls must dive below.
Page 292 - A seeming mermaid steers ; the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands, That yarely frame the office. From the barge A strange, invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast Her people out upon her ; and Antony, Enthroned in the market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to the air ; which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in nature.
Page 331 - Lie there, thou shadow of an emperor; The place thou pressest on thy mother earth Is all thy empire now: now it contains thee; Some few days hence, and then 'twill be too large, When thou'rt contracted in thy narrow urn, Shrunk to a few cold ashes; then Octavia (For Cleopatra will not live to see it), Octavia then will have...
Page 188 - Let him retire, betwixt two ages cast, The first of this, and hindmost of the last. A losing gamester, let him sneak away ; He bears no ready money from the play. The fate, which governs poets, thought it fit 55 He should not raise his fortunes by his wit.
Page 332 - Sure there's contagion in the tears of friends • See, I have caught it too. Believe me, 'tis not For my own griefs, but thine.
Page 312 - If a little glittering in discourse has passed them on us for witty men, where was the necessity of undeceiving the world ? Would a man who has an ill title to an estate, but yet is in possession of it, would he bring it of his own accord to be tried at Westminster?
Page 240 - DISTRUST, and darkness of a future state, Make poor mankind so fearful of their fate. Death, in itself, is nothing ; but we fear, To be we know not what, we know not where.
Page 241 - tis all a cheat ; Yet, fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit ; Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay : To-morrow's falser than the former day ; Lies worse, and, while it says, we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Page 307 - Particularly, the action is so much one that it is the only of the kind without episode or underplot; every scene in the tragedy conducing to the main design, and every act concluding with a turn of it.

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