Robert Southey

“ Peter Hopkins would never listen to any patient who proposed waiting for a lucky day before he entered upon a prescribed course of medicine. “Go by the moon as much as you please,” he would say; “have your hair cut, if you think best while it wexes, and cut your corns while it wanes; and put off any thing till a lucky day that may as well be done on one day as another. But the right day to be bled is when you want bleeding; the right day for taking physic is when physic is necessary.” ”

“ Observe, Reader, that I call him simply Wilberforce, because any common prefix would seem to disparage that name, especially if used by one who regarded him with admiration; and with respect, which is better than admiration, because it can be felt for those only whose virtues entitle them to it; and with kindliness, which is better than both, because it is called forth by those kindly qualities that are worth more than any talents, and without which a man, though he may be both great and good, never can be amiable. ”

“ Bacon had undergone was very different in kind: what he delighted to think, was, that the souls of those whom death and redemption have made perfect, are in a world where there is no change, nor parting, where nothing fades, nothing passes away and is no more seen, but the good and the beautiful are permanent. ”

“ The way in which too many ordinary minds are worsened by the mere course of time is finely delineated by Landor, in some verses which he designed as an imitation, not of a particular passage in a favourite Greek author, but of his manner and style of thought.
Friendship, in each successive stage of life,
As we approach him, varies to the view;
In youth he wears the face of Love himself,
Of Love without his arrows and his wings. ”

“ Perhaps the greatest advantage of public education, as compared with private, is, that it presents more such opportunities than are ever met with in any subsequent stage of human life. And yet even then in friendship, as afterwards in love, we are for the most part less directed by choice than by what is called chance.
Daniel Dove never associated with so many persons of his own age at any other time as during his studies at Leyden. ”

“ Vanity, presumption, ambition, adulation, malice and folly, flatulent emptiness and ill digested fulness, misdirected talent and misapplied devotion, wantonness and want, good motives, bad motives, and mixed motives have given birth to verses in such numberless numbers, that the great lake of Oblivion in which they have sunk, must long ago have been filled up, if there had been any bottom to it. But had it been so filled up, and a foundation thus laid, the quantity of love poems which have gone to the same place, would have made a pile there that would have been the eighth wonder of the world. ”

“ The truth is that there may be, and often is, an attachment of one boy to another, that looks very like a friendship; and while they are in circumstances that enable them mutually to oblige and to assist each other, promises well and bids fair to be lasting. But they are no sooner separated from each other, by entering into the world at large, than other connexions and new employments in which they no longer share together, efface the remembrance of what passed in earlier days, and they become strangers to each other for ever. ”

“ I once met with a book in which a servant girl had written on a blank leaf, “not much love after marriage, but a good deal before!” In her station of life this is but too true; and in high stations also, and in all those intermediate grades where either the follies of the world, or its cares, exercise over us an unwholesome influence. But it is not so with well constituted minds in those favorable circumstances wherein the heart is neither corrupted by wealth, nor hardened by neediness. ”

“ Herschel would have opened no new field of speculation for Peter Hopkins, if Hopkins had lived till that day; but he would have eradicated the last remains of his lurking belief in astrology, by showing how little those who pretended to read the stars, had seen or known of them. The old man would have parted with it easily, though he delighted in obsolete knowledge, and took as much interest in making himself acquainted with the freaks of the human mind, as with the maladies of the human frame. ”

“ But he had looked for consolation, where, when sincerely sought, it is always to be found; and he had experienced that religion effects in a true believer all that philosophy professes, and more than all that mere philosophy can perform. The wounds which stoicism would cauterize, religion heals.
There is a resignation with which, it may be feared, most of us deceive ourselves. To bear what must be borne, and submit to what cannot be resisted, is no more than what the unregenerate heart is taught by the instinct of animal nature. ”

“ London in his days was a better school for young men in trade than it ever was before, or has been since. The civic power had quietly and imperceptibly put an end to that club-law which once made the apprentices a turbulent and formidable body, at any moment armed as well as ready for a riot; and masters exercised a sort of parental controul over the youth entrusted to them, which in later times it may be feared has not been so conscientiously exerted, because it is not likely to be so patiently endured. ”

“ Whether it should be taken upon an empty stomach, must depend upon the constitution of the reader. If he is of that happy complexion that he awakes in the morning with his spirits elastic as the air, fresh as the dawn, and joyous as the sky-lark, let him by all means read a chapter before breakfast. ”

“ When life is extinguished, it is too late for them to struggle for deliverance from the body of that death, to which, while the choice was in their power, they wilfully and inseparably bound themselves. ”

“ We had our monarchy, our hierarchy and our aristocracy,—God be praised for the benefits which have been derived from all three, and God in his mercy continue them to us! but we had no plutarchy, no millionaires, no great capitalists to break down the honest and industrious trader with the weight of their overbearing and overwhelming wealth. ”

“ I hope it did not as a consequence, make her bestow too much love before marriage herself, and meet with too little after it. I have said much of worthless verses upon this subject; take now, readers, some that may truly be called worthy of it. They are by the Manchester Poet, Charles Swain.
1.
Love?—I will tell thee what it is to love!
It is to build with human thoughts a shrine,
Where Hope sits brooding like a beauteous dove;
Where Time seems young, and Life a thing divine. ”

“ We may well believe that they whom faith has sanctified, and who upon their departure join the spirits of the “just made perfect,” may at once be removed from all concern with this world of probation, except so far as might add to their own happiness, and be made conducive to the good of others, in the ways of Providence. But by parity of reason, it may be concluded that the sordid and the sensual, they whose affections have been set upon worldly things, and who are of the earth earthy, will be as unable to rise above this earth, as they would be incapable of any pure and spiritual enjoyment. ”

“ He indeed was put to his wits end, for words wherewith to fill up the time; and he introduced so many truisms, and argued at the utmost length so many indisputable points, and expatiated so profusely upon so many trite ones, that Judge Marshal (the biographer of Washington and the most patient of listeners,) was so far moved at last as to say, “Mr. Such a one!— (addressing him by his name in a deliberate tone of the mildest reprehension,) —there are some things with which the Court should be supposed to be acquainted.” ”

“ It is no disparagement for any man of letters, however great his endowments, and however extensive his erudition, to take part in those patient and humble labours by which honour is rendered to his predecessors, and information preserved for those who come after him.
But in every original work which lives and deserves to live there must have been some charms which no editorial diligence can preserve, no critical sagacity recover. ”

“ In vain might a Bishop warn his hearers from the pulpit and from the press that “no soothsayer, no palterer, no judicial astrologer is able to tell any man the events of his life.” Man is a dupeable animal. Quacks in medicine, quacks in religion, and quacks in politics know this, and act upon that knowledge. ”

“ Bacon followed the course here pointed out, but from his own good sense and natural humility. His only ambition was to be useful; if a desire may be called ambitious which originated in the sincere sense of duty. To think of distinguishing himself in any other way, would for him, he well knew, have been worse than an idle dream. The time expended in composing a sermon as a perfunctory official business, would have been worse than wasted for himself, and the time employed in delivering it, no better than wasted upon his congregation. ”

“ Lecteur, mon ami! an Incog has no face. But this I say in the face, or in all the faces, of that Public which has more heads than a Hindu Divinity, that the character and contents of the book were fairly, fully, carefully and considerately denoted,—that is to say, notified or made known, in the title-page. Turn to it, I intreat you, Sir! The first thing which you cannot but notice, is, that it is in motley. ”

“ Such would always be the politics of the many, if they were let alone; and such would always be their religion. As regards the civil point this is the best condition in which a people can be, both for themselves and their rulers; and if the laws be good and well administered, the form of government is good so far as it is causative of those effects, and so far as it is not causative, it is a trifle for which none but fools would contest. The proper end of all government being the general good, provided that good be attained it is infinitesimally insignificant by what means. ”

“ I would therefore modestly insinuate to the reader what infinite advantages would be possessed by that fortunate person who shall be the homo hujus libri.
According to the Lawyers the King's eldest son is for certain purposes of full age as soon as he is born,—great being the mysteries of Law! I will not assume that in like manner hic liber is at once to acquire maturity of fame; for fame, like the oak, is not the product of a single generation; and a new book in its reputation is but as an acorn, the full growth of which can be known only by posterity. ”

“ There is an abundant field of the works of others open to him, from the wisest and the best of men, the weight of whose little fingers, in argument or instruction, will be greater than his own loins, even at his highest maturity. There is clearly no want of new compositions, excepting on some new or occasional emergencies: for there is not an open subject in the Christian religion, which has not been discussed by men of the greatest learning and piety, who have left behind them numerous works for our assistance and edification. ”

“ They recurred thither oftener than he wished, although few men have been more masters of themselves; and then the remembrance of his wife, whom he had lost by a lingering disease in middle age; and of the children, those who had died during their childhood, and those who in reality were almost as much lost to him in the ways of the world, made him alway turn for comfort to the prospect of that better state of existence in which they should once more all be gathered together, and where there would be neither change nor parting. ”

“ For a disposition thus evil in its nature it almost seems as if there could be no hope. On the other hand there is no security in a good one, if the support of good principles, (that is to say, of religion—of christian faith—) be wanting. It may be soured by misfortunes, it may be corrupted by wealth, it may be blighted by neediness, it may lose “all its original brightness.”
School friendships arise out of sympathy of disposition at an age when the natural disposition is under little controul and less disguise ”

“ But there is an original pravity which deserves to be so called in the darkest import of the term,—an inborn and incurable disease of the moral being, manifested as soon as it has strength to show itself; and wherever this is perceived in earliest youth, it may too surely be predicted what is to be expected when all controul of discipline is removed. Of those that bring with them such a disposition into the world, it cannot be said that they fall into sin, because it is too manifest that they seek and pursue it as the bent of their nature. ”

“ And every visto is employed only for the useful purpose of breaking the stiff straight lines, of lighting up the dark, of heightening the little, and of colouring over the lifeless, in the regular history of the Doctor. ”