Quotes
Quotes - Milton
Beauty stands
In the admiration only of weak minds
Led captive.
Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck'd.
Of whom to be disprais'd were no small praise.
Elephants endors'd with towers.
Syene, and where the shadow both way falls,
Meroe, Nilotic isle.
Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreath'd.
The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day.
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence.
The olive grove of Academe,
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.
Thence to the famous orators repair,
Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that fierce democratie,
Shook the arsenal, and fulmin'd over Greece,
To Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne.
Socrates...
Whom well inspir'd the oracle pronounc'd
Wisest of men.
Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself.
As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore.
Or if I would delight my private hours
With music or with poem, where so soon
As in our native language can I find
That solace?
Till morning fair
Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
The sun to me is dark
And silent as the moon,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Ran on embattled armies clad in iron,
And, weaponless himself,
Made arms ridiculous.
Just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to men;
Unless there be who think not God at all.
What boots it at one gate to make defence,
And at another to let in the foe?
But who is this, what thing of sea or land,--
Female of sex it seems,--
That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay,
Comes this way sailing
Like a stately ship
Of Tarsus, bound for th' isles
Of Javan or Gadire,
With all her bravery on, and tackle trim,
Sails fill'd, and streamers waving,
Courted by all the winds that hold them play,
An amber scent of odorous perfume
Her harbinger?
Yet beauty, though injurious, hath strange power,
After offence returning, to regain
Love once possess'd.
He's gone, and who knows how he may report
Thy words by adding fuel to the flame?
For evil news rides post, while good news baits.
And as an ev'ning dragon came,
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order rang'd
Of tame villatic fowl.
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame,--nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
