The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, Volume 2

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J. Murray, 1834 - 336 pages

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Page 35 - For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are ; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
Page 47 - He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.
Page 35 - And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book : who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image ; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.
Page 42 - And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.
Page 37 - Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Page 35 - We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life.
Page 47 - It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil.
Page 47 - ... our sage and serious poet SPENSER, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than SCOTUS or AQUINAS...
Page 77 - Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears ; Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o'er the land and rob the blighted rye : There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, And to the ragged infant threaten war...
Page 86 - passing rich with forty pounds a year?" Ah! no, a Shepherd of a different stock, And far unlike him, feeds this little flock; A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's task, As much as God or Man can fairly ask; The rest he gives to loves and labours light, To Fields the morning and to Feasts the night; None better...

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