Talk:John Armstrong (poet)

Draft

S. Austin Allibone, Poetical Quotations from Chaucer to Tennyson (1873)

• Sated with nature's boons, what thousands seek,
  With dishes tortured from their native taste,
  And mad variety, to spur beyond
  Its wiser will the jaded appetite!
  • Art of Preserving Health (Feasts)

• Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene
  Supports the mind supports the body too.
  Hence the most vital movement mortals feel
  Is hope: the balm and life-blood of the soul.
  • Art of Preserving Health (Health)

• What avails it that indulgent heaven
  From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
  If we, ingenious to torment ourselves,
  Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
  • Art of Preserving Health (Anxiety)

• Our greatest good, and what we can least spare,
  Is hope: the last of all our evils, fear.
  • Art of Preserving Health (Hope)

• What dext'rous thousands, just within the goal
  Of wild debauch direct their nightly course.
  • Art of Preserving Health (Intemperance)

•                       Know whate'er
  Beyond its natural fervour hurries on
  The sanguine tide; whether the frequent bowl,
  High-season'd fare, or exercise to toil
  Protracted, spurs to its last stage tired life,
  And sows the temples with untimely snow.
  • Art of Preserving Health (Intemperance)

•                       An anxious stomach well
  May be endured; so may the throbbing head:
  But such a dim delirium, such a dream
  Involves you, such a dastardly despair
  Unmans your soul, as maddening Pentheus felt
  When, baited round Cithæron's cruel sides,
  He saw two suns, and double Thebes ascend.

• From other care absolved, the busy mind
  Finds in yourself a theme to pore upon:
  It finds you miserable, or makes you so.
  • Art of Preserving Health (Melancholy)

• There is a charm, a power, that sways the breast
  Bids every passion revel or be still;
  Inspires with rage, or all our cares dissolves;
  Can soothe distraction, and almost despair:
  That power is music.
  • Art of Preserving Health (Music)

•                       Happy he whose toil
  Has o'er his languid powerless limbs diffused
  A pleasing lassitude; he not in vain
  Invokes the gentle deity of dreams:
  His powers the most voluptuously dissolve
  In soft repose: on him the balmy dews
  Of sleep with double nutriment descend.
  • Art of Preserving Health (Sleep)

• What does not fade? The tower that long had stood
  The crush of thunder and the warring winds,
  Shook by the slow but sure destroyer Time,
  Now hangs in doubtful ruins o'er its base,
  And flinty pyramids and walls of brass
  Descend.
  • Wrecks and Mutations of Time (Time)

• Virtue, the strength and beauty of the soul,
  Is the best gift of heaven: a happiness
  That even above the smiles and frowns of fate
  Exalts great nature's favourites; a wealth
  That ne'er encumbers, nor can be transferr'd.
  • Art of Preserving Health (Virtue)