Pleasure is a privy game
Which vice doth still provoke;
Pomp, unprompt; and fame a flume; Power, a smouldering smoke.
Who meaneth to remove the rock
Out of his slimy mud; Shall mire himself, and hardly 'scape
The swelling of the flood.
Rarely they rise by virtue's aid, who lie Plung'd in the depths of helpless poverty.
It is not poverty so much as pretence, that harasses a ruined man—the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse—the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.
Washington Irving.
Such were those prime of days.
But now those white unblemish'd manners, whence The fabling poets took the golden age, Are found no more amid these iron times, These dregs of life! Now the distemper'd mind Has lost that concord of harmonious powers Which forms the soul of happiness, and all Is off the poize within. The passions all
