Classical English letter-writer: or, Epistolary selections designed to improve young persons in the art of letter writing, by the author of 'Lessons for young persons in humble life'.

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Thomas Wilson, 1814
 

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Page 20 - And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale. Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the landscape round it measures; Russet lawns, and fallows gray, Where the nibbling flocks do stray; Mountains, on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest ; Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks, and rivers wide: Towers and battlements it sees Bosom'd high in tufted trees, Where perhaps some Beauty lies, The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes.
Page 228 - This Exhibition has filled the heads of the Artists and lovers of art. Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious, since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many trifles to rid us of our time, of that time which never can return.
Page 333 - I shall never envy the honours which wit and learning obtain in any other cause, if I can be numbered among the writers who have given ardour to virtue, and confidence to truth.
Page 141 - ... the world recedes it disappears heaven opens on my eyes my ears with sounds seraphic ring lend lend your wings i mount i fly o grave where is thy victory o death where is thy sting.
Page 263 - I was alarmed, and prayed God, that however he might afflict my body, he would spare my understanding. This prayer, that I might try the integrity of my faculties, I made in Latin verse. The lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good: I made them easily, and and concluded myself to be unimpaired in my faculties.
Page 265 - ... communicated or some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel, or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered, may embroider a day or a week ; but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life. A friend may be often found and lost, but an old friend never can be found, and nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost.
Page 221 - ... the tribute of nature has been paid. The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues, of which we are lamenting our deprivation.
Page 215 - ... death, Lord, let it not be terrible, and then take thine own time: I submit to it: let not mine, O Lord! but let thy will be done.
Page 142 - Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood Stand dressed in living green: So to the Jews old Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between.
Page 253 - Oxford, when he was a young man, had the care of a neighbouring parish for fifteen pounds a year, which he was never paid ; but he counted it a convenience that it compelled him to make a sermon weekly. One woman he could not bring to the communion ; and when he reproved or exhorted her, she only answered, that she was no scholar. He was advised to set some good woman or man of the parish, a little wiser than herself, to talk to her in language level to her mind.

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