Why dost thou build up stately rooms on high, Thou who art under ground to lie? Thou sow’st and plantest, but no fruit must see, For death, alas! is reaping thee.
ABRAHAM COWLEYTo th’ active Moon a quick brisk stroke he gave, To Saturn’s string a touch more sore and grave.
More Abraham Cowley Quotes
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Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?
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To th’ active Moon a quick brisk stroke he gave, To Saturn’s string a touch more sore and grave.
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Let’s banish business, banish sorrow; To the gods belong to-morrow.
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God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.
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Life for delays and doubts no time does give, None ever yet made haste enough to live.
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Fill all the Glasses there; for why Should every Creature Drink but I? Why, Man of Morals, tell me why?
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Stones of small worth may lie unseen by day, But night itself does the rich gem betray.
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Coy Nature, (which remain’d, though aged grown, A beauteous virgin still, enjoy’d by none, Nor seen unveil’d by anyone),
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His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I’m sure, was in the right.
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Ah, yet, e’er I descend to th’ grave, May I a small House and a large Garden have. And a few Friends, and many Books both true
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Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise, He who defers this work from day to day, Does on a river’s bank expecting stay
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The present is all the ready money Fate can give.
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Curiosity does, no less than devotion, pilgrims make.
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And I myself a Catholic will be, So far at least, great saint, to pray to thee. Hail, Bard triumphant! and some care bestow On us, the Poets militant below.
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Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.
ABRAHAM COWLEY