The Defense of Poesy, Otherwise Known as An Apology for Poetry

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Ginn, 1890 - 143 pages
 

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Page 96 - Ecstasy ! My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time, And makes as healthful music : it is not madness That I have utter'd : bring me to the test, And I the matter will re-word ; which madness Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace, Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, That not your trespass, but my madness speaks : It will but skin and film the ulcerous place, Whilst rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen.
Page 123 - And let those that play your clowns, speak no more than is set down for them : for there be of them, that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too ; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous; and . shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.
Page 94 - 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 72 - The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM...
Page 103 - O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities: For nought so vile that on the earth doth' live But to the earth some special good doth give...
Page 48 - Upon the back of that comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave. While in the mean time two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?
Page 59 - Townfolks my strength ; a daintier judge applies His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise ; Some lucky wits impute it but to chance...
Page xxxiv - I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem...
Page 7 - Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature...
Page 62 - ... the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.

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