Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought! Through what variety of untried being, Through what new scenes and changes must we pass? The wide, the unbounded prospect lies before me; Before creation peopled earth, Its eyes shall roll through chaos back, While sun is quenched, or system breaks, But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it. Spirit, proud spirit, ponder thy state, BYRON. If thine the leaf's lightness, not thine the leaf's fate. It may flutter, and glisten, and wither, and die, And heed not our pity, and ask not our sigh; But for thee, the immortal, no winter may throw Eternal repose on thy joy or thy woe; Thou must live, and live ever, in glory or gloom, Beyond the world's precincts, beyond the dark tomb. MISS JEWSBURY. Our better nature pineth-let it be! MISS LANDON. 112 EXPERIENCE-FAITH. With pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last. POPE. But the old and the grave look on, pitying the generous youth, Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of death, To break the shock blind nature cannot shun, And lands thought smoothly on the further shore. For want of faith, YOUNG. For they also have tasted long ago the bitter-Down the steep precipice of wrong he slides; ness of hope destroyed; They pity him, and are sad, remembering the days that are past, But they know he must taste for himself, or he will not give ear to their wisdom. TUPPER. Experience hath another lesson, which a man will do well if he learn, By checking the flight of expectation, to cheat disappointment of its pain. TUPPER. A thousand volumes in a thousand tongues, enshrine the lesson of Experience; Yet a man shall read them all, and go forth none the wiser, If self-love lendeth him a glass, to color all he conneth, Lest in the features of another he find his own complexion. TUPPER. Experience joined with common sense, To mortals is a providence. GREEN. All is but lip-wisdom which wants experience. SIR P. SIDNEY. There's nothing to support him in the right. YOUNG. 'Tis faith disarms destruction; and absolves From every clamorous charge the guiltless tomb. YOUNG. True faith and reason are the soul's two eyes; Faith evermore looks upward, and descries Objects remote; but reason can discover Things only near, sees nothing that's above her. QUARLES. Faith makes me anything, or all That I believe is in the sacred story; And when sin placeth me in Adam's fall, Faith sets me higher in his glory. HERBERT. Faith lights us through the dark to Deity; While, without sight, we witness that she shows More God than in his works our eyes can see. SIR W. DAVENANT. |