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There goes the parson, oh illustrious spark! And there, scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk.
William Cowper
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The beggarly last doit.
William Cowper
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The slaves of custom and established mode, With pack-horse constancy we keep the road Crooked or straight, through quags or thorny dells, True to the jingling of our leader's bells.
William Cowper
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Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen, Delightful industry enjoy'd at home, An Nature, in her cultivated trim Dress'ed to his taste, inviting him abroad - Can he want occupation who has these?
William Cowper
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Did Charity prevail, the press would prove A vehicle of virtue, truth, and love.
William Cowper
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Absence of occupation is not rest; A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.
William Cowper
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Truth is the golden girdle of the globe.
William Cowper
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Thus happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose.
William Cowper
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Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain.
William Cowper
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Fanaticism, the false fire of an overheated mind.
William Cowper
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Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat, To peep at such a world; to see the stir Of the Great Babel, and not feel the crowd.
William Cowper
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[My kitten] is dressed in a tortoise-shell suit, and I know you will delight in her.
William Cowper
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Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books.
William Cowper
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Spring hangs her infant blossoms on the trees, Rock'd in the cradle of the western breeze.
William Cowper
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All constraint, / Except what wisdom lays on evil men, / Is evil.
William Cowper
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Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood.
William Cowper
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An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting.
William Cowper
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No traveler e'er reached that blest abode who found not thorns and briers in his road.
William Cowper
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Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavor.
William Cowper
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They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed.
William Cowper
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They love the country, and none else, who seek For their own sake its silence and its shade. Delights which who would leave, that has a heart Susceptible of pity, or a mind Cultured and capable of sober thought.
William Cowper
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I pity bashful men, who feel the pain Of fancied scorn and undeserved disdain, And bear the marks upon a blushing face, OF needless shame, and self-impos'd disgrace.
William Cowper
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Misery still delights to trace Its semblance in another's case.
William Cowper
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The Cross! There, and there only (though the deist rave, and the atheist, if Earth bears so base a slave); There and there only, is the power to save.
William Cowper
