He who grown aged in this world of woe, In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, So that no wonder waits him.

And angling too, that solitary vice, What Izaak Walton sings or says: The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?.

It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

So for a good old-gentlemanly vice, I think I must take up with avarice.

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand; I saw from out the wave of her structure's rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Look'd to the winged Lion's marble pines, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.

Accursed be the city where the laws would stifle nature's!