This is the patent-age of new inventions For killing bodies, and for saving souls, All propagated with the best intentions; Sir Humphrey Davy's lantern, by which coals Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions, Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles, Are ways to benefit mankind, as true, Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.
In secret we met - In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget, Thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee After long years, How should I greet thee? - With silence and tears
The castled crag of Drachenfels, Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine, Whose breast of waters broadly swells Between the banks which bear the vine, And hills all rich with blossom'd trees, And fields which promise corn and wine, And scatter'd cities crowning these, Whose far white walls along them shine.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
I hate all pain, Given or received; we have enough within us The meanest vassal as the loftiest monarch, Not to add to each other's natural burden Of mortal misery.
So do the dark in soul expire, Or live like scorpion girt by fire; So writhes the mind remorse hath riven, Unfit for earth, undoom'd for heaven, Darkness above, despair beneath, Around it flame, within it death.
But at sixteen the conscience rarely gnaws So much, as when we call our old debts in At sixty years, and draw the accounts of evil, And find a deuced balance with the devil.
What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.