IDLENESS-continued.

IDLENESS-ILL DEEDS.

Like a coy maiden, ease, when courted most,

Farthest retires-an idol, at whose shrine

275

Who oftenest sacrifice are favoured least. Cowper, Task, 1.409.

How various his employments, whom the world

Calls idle; and who justly, in return,

Esteems that busy world an idler too!

By nature's laws, immutable and just,

Cowper, Task, 111. 352.

Enjoyment stops where indolence begins;

And purposeless, to-morrow, borrowing sloth,

Itself heaps on its shoulders loads of woe,

Too heavy to be borne.

Tax not my sloth that I

Fold my arms beside the brook;

Each cloud that floateth in the sky

Writes a letter in my book.

IGNORANCE.

Pollok, Course of Time.

Ignorance is the curse of God,

Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

We ignorant of ourselves,

Emerson.

Sh. Hen. VI. p. 2, 1v. 7.

Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers

Deny us for our good; so find we profit,

By losing of our prayers.

Whilst timorous knowledge stands considering,

Sh. Ant. Cleop. II. 1.

Audacious ignorance hath done the deed;

For who knows most, the most he knows to doubt;

The least discourse is commonly most stout.

Daniel.

The truest characters of ignorance

Are vanity, and pride, and arrogance;

As blind men use to bear their noses higher

Than those that have their eyes and sight entire.

Butler.

From ignorance our comfort flows,

By ignorance is pride increas'd;

The only wretched are the wise. Prior, To Hon. C. Montague.

They most assume who know the least.

Gay, Fables.

Gray, Ode on Eton College.

Where ignorance is bliss

'Tis folly to be wise.

With just enough of learning to misquote. Byron, Eng. Bards.

Where blind and naked ignorance

Delivers brawling judgments, unabashed,

On all things all day long.

Tennyson, Idylls, Vivien.

276

IMAGINATION.

IMAGINATION-IMMORTALITY.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;

That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt;

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation, and a name.

Sh. M. N. D. v. 1.

Which o'er informs the pencil and the pen,

And o'erpowers the page where it would bloom again!

Byron, Ch. H.

Byron.

Imagination frames events unknown,

In wild, fantastic shapes of hideous ruin;
And what it fears creates!

Hannah More.

Do what he will, he cannot realise

Half he conceives-the glorious vision flies;

Go where he may, he cannot hope to find

The truth, the beauty pictur'd in his mind. Rogers, Human Life.

IMMORTALITY.

It must be so, Plato, thou reasonest well:

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortality P

Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror
Of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on itself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis heaven itself that points out a hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.

Addison, Cato, v. 1.

IMMORTALITY-IMPATIENCE.

IMMORTALITY-continued.

The soul, secure in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger, and defies its point:
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,

The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds.

277

Addison, Cato, v. 1.

Immortal! Ages past, yet nothing gone!
Morn without eve! A race without a goal!
Unshorten'd by progression infinite!
Futurity for ever future! Life,
Beginning still, where computation ends!
'Tis the description of a deity!

Can it be?

Young, N. T. VI. 542.

Matter immortal? and shall spirit die P
Above the nobler shall less noble rise?
Shall man alone, for whom all else revives,
No resurrection know? Shall man alone,
Imperial man! be sown in barren ground,
Less privileg'd than grain, on which he feeds?
Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live for ever?
Is it less trange, that thou shouldst live at all!
This is a miracle; and that no more.

Immortality o'ersweeps

All pains, all tears, all time, all fears, and peals
Like the eternal thunders of the deep,
Into my ears this truth-Thou liv'st for ever!
Cold in the dust this perish'd heart may lie,
But that which warm'd it once shall never die.
A voice within us speaks that startling word-
"Man thou shalt never die!" Celestial voices
Hymn it into our souls; according harps,
By angel fingers touched, when the mild star
Of morning sang together, sound forth still
The song of our great immortality.

IMPLACABILITY.

1. VI. 701.

Ib. VII. 1407.

Byron.

Campbell.

R. H. Dana (Ат.).

Not to relent is beastly, savage, devilish. Sh. Ric. III. 1. 4.

IMPATIENCE.

Oh! how impatience gains upon the soul,

When the long promised hour of joy draws near!

How slow the tardy moments seem to roll!

Mrs. Tighe.

278

IMPLORING.

IMPLORING-INCONSTANCY.

Dismiss your vows, your feigned tears, your flattery;

For where a heart is hard, they make no battery. Sh. V. & A. IMPOSSIBILITY.

And what's impossible can't be,

And never, never comes to pass. G. Colman, Maid of the Moor. IMPRISONMENT.

Captivity,

That comes with honour, is true liberty. Massinger, F. Dowry.

Death is the pledge of rest, and with one bail,

Two prisons quits; the body and the jail.

IMPUDENCE.

He that has but impudence,

To all things has a fair pretence;

And, put among his wants but shame,

Bishop King.

To all the world may lay his claim. Butler, Misc. Thoughts.

With that dull, rooted, callous impudence,

Which, dead to shame, and ev'ry nicer sense,

Ne'er blushed; unless in spreading vice's snares,

He blunder'd on some virtue unawares. Churchill, Rosciad.

INCOME-see Money, Prosperity.

I've often wished that I had clear,
For life, six hundred pounds a year,
A handsome house to lodge a friend,

A river at my garden's end.

INCONSTANCY-see Change.

Pope, Imit. of Horace, II. 6.

Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more ;
Men were deceivers ever;

One foot in sea, and one on shore;

To one thing constant never.

Sh. M. Ado. II. 3.

Ev'n as one heat another heat expels,

Or as one nail by strength drives out another;

So the remembrance of my former love,

Is by a newer object quite forgotten.

Sh. Two G. II. 4.

Let us examine all the creatures, read
The book of nature through, and we shall find
Nothing doth still the same; the stars do wander,
And have their divers influence; the elements

Shuffle into innumerable changes;

Our constitutions vary; herbs and trees

Admit their frosts and summer: and why then

Should our desires, that are so nimble, and

More subtle than the spirits in our blood,

INCONSTANCY-INDEPENDENCE.

279

INCONSTANCY-continued.

Be such staid things within us, and not share
Their nat'ral liberty? Shall we admit a change

In smaller things, and not allow it in

What most of all concerns us P

Shirley, Traitor.

There are three things a wise man will not trust:

The wind, the sunshine of an April day,

And woman's plighted faith.

Southey, Madoc.

There is no music in a voice,

That is but one and still the same ;

Inconstancy is but a name,

To fright poor lovers from a better choice. Rutter, Shep. Hol.

I do confess thou'rt sweet, yet find

Thee such an unthrift of thy sweets,

Thy favours are but like the wind,

That kisses everything it meets.

And since thou canst with more than one,

Thou'rt worthy to be kiss'd by none.

INDEPENDENCE.

Bless'd are those

Sir Robert Ayton.

Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled

That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger

To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him

In my heart's core, aye, in my heart of heart,

As I do thee.

Sh. Ham. III. 2.

Whose armour is his honest thought,

And simple truth his utmost skill. Sir H. Wotton, Happy Life.

Lord of himself, though not of lands;

And having nothing, yet hath all.

Ib.

Himself can fix or change his fate. Prior, The Old Gentry, 5.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,

But looks thro' nature up to nature's God. Pope, E. M. Iv.331.

Hail! independence, hail! heaven's next best gift.

To that of life and an immortal soul!

The life of life, that to the banquet high

And sober meal gives taste; to the bow'd roof

Fair-dream'd repose, and to the cottage charms. Thomson, Lib.