The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Volume 16

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J. Limbird, 1830

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Page 237 - It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent.
Page 251 - 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...
Page 423 - Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
Page 138 - Year. When I considered the Fragrancy of the Walks and Bowers, with the Choirs of Birds that sung upon the Trees, and the loose Tribe of People that walked under their Shades, I could not but look upon the Place as a kind of Mahometan Paradise.
Page 412 - THREE Poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpassed; The next in majesty •, In both the last. The force of Nature could no further go ; To make a third, she joined the former two.
Page 417 - ... and each was ambitious of surmounting the arduous task. But, when they arrived at the swelling, it jutted out so in their way, and was so far beyond their grasp, that the most daring lads were awed, and acknowledged the undertaking to be too hazardous. So the ravens built on, nest upon nest, in perfect security, till the fatal day arrived in which the wood was to be levelled. It was in the month of February) when those birds usually sit.
Page 111 - There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things : our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.
Page 236 - It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
Page 112 - Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time...
Page 89 - Mrs Hicks and her daughter, aged nine, were hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm by pulling off their stockings, and making a lather of soap ! With this crowning atrocity, the catalogue of murders in England closes.

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