Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them....I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

Who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper softness in chambers?

Fairy damsels met in forest wide / By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, / Lancelot or Pelleas, or Pellenore.

And may at last my weary age Find out the peaceful hermitage, The hairy gown and mossy cell, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every star that heaven doth shew, And every herb that sips the dew, Till old experience to attain To something like prophetic strain.

Now conscience wakes despair That slumber'd,-wakes the bitter memory Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse.

In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.

Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.