I never, with important air, In conversation overbear. . . . . My tongue within my lips I rein; For who talks much must talk in vain.
Give me, kind heaven, a private station, a mind serene for contemplation.
Fill it up. I take as large draughts of liquor as I did of love. I hate a flincher in either.
Exercise thy lasting youth defends.
Envy is a kind of praise.
Around the steel no tortur'd worm shall twine, No blood of living insect stain my line; Let me, less cruel, cast the feather'd hook, With pliant rod athwart the pebbled brook, Silent along the mazy margin stray, And with the fur-wrought fly delude the prey.