Disputed quotes — John Dryden
1631–1700 England
246 quotes
Love reckons hours for months, and days for years;
And every little absence is an age.
The feeble old, indulgent of their ease.
No plough shall hurt the glebe, no pruning-hook the vine.
One world sufficed not Alexander’s mind;
Coop’d up he seem’d, in earth and seas confined.
Noble Boyle, not less in nature seen
Than his great brother read in states and men.
Nor love his peace of mind destroys,
Nor wicked avarice of wealth.
Yet unimpair’d with labours, or with time,
Your age but seems to a new youth to climb.
Time seems not now beneath his years to stoop,
Nor do his wings with sickly feathers droop.
O’er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down,
Till with his silent sickle they are mown.
That the spent earth may gather heart again,
And, better’d by cessation, bear the grain.
’Tis good for arable; a glebe that asks
Tough teams of oxen; and laborious tasks.
Men plough with oxen of their own
Their small paternal field of corn.
To his county farm the fool confined;
Rude work well suited with a rustic mind.
Too truly Tamerlane’s successors they;
Each thinks a world too little for his sway.
Long galleries of ancestors
Challenge nor wonder or esteem from me:
"Virtue alone is true nobility."
When we behold an angel, not to fear,
Is to be impudent.
His pensive cheek upon his hand reclined,
And anxious thoughts revolving in his mind.
Let this and every other anxious thought
At th’ entrance of my threshold be forgot.
Attribution
Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Dryden (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.