John Conington Quotes

Bear up, and live for happier days.

She turned, and flashed upon their view
Her stately neck's purpureal hue;
Ambrosial tresses round her head
A more than earthly fragrance shed:
Her falling robe her footprints swept,
And showed the goddess as she stept.

A critical sense of style and of poetic form is not easy to attain, nor is it of first importance for the younger, or, indeed, for any student of Virgil. Wide open to anyone who is willing to learn is the richer knowledge of Virgil as a poet who loved his country and who loved also that humanity which existed before Rome, exists today within ourselves, and will exist long after our own civilization, like that of Virgil's Rome, has become a matter of "ancient history." It is true that the longer one has lived the better one can appreciate a poem which is concerned with life. But the gain that comes to us with the years depends, partly at least, upon the riches we have been willing to extract from literature, which is the experience of other men and women written out. In youth's search for this treasure the Aeneid will be at once a fair haven and a port of departure.

If men and mortal arms ye slight,
Know there are gods who watch o'er right.

Fierce boils in every vein
Indignant shame and passion blind,
The tempest of the lover's mind,
The soldier's high disdain.

She calls it marriage now; such name
She chooses to conceal her shame.

Fell lust of gold! abhorred, accurst!
What will not men to slake such thirst?

Then come the clamour and the blare,
And shouts and clarions rend the air.

Here sees he the illustrious dead
Who fighting for their country bled;
Priests who while earthly life remained
Preserved that life unsoiled, unstained;
Blest bards, transparent souls and clear,
Whose song was worthy Phoebus' ear;
Inventors who by arts refined
The common lot of human kind,
With all who grateful memory won
By services to others done:
A goodly brotherhood, bedight
With coronals of virgin white.

Along the illimitable shade
Darkling and lone their way they made, Through the vast kingdom of the dead, An empty void, though tenanted:
So travellers in a forest move
With but the uncertain moon above,
Beneath her niggard light.

An inferior artist's only chance of giving pleasure.

Fury and wrath within me rave,
And tempt me to a warrior's grave.

From me you fly! Ah! let me crave,
By these poor tears, that hand you gave—
Since, parting with my woman's pride,
My madness leaves me nought beside—
By that our wedlock, by the rite
Which, but begun, could yet unite,
If e'er my kindness held you bound,
If e'er in my joy you found,
Look on this falling house, and still,
If prayer can touch you, change your will.

Fear proves a base-born soul.

They can because they think they can.