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A

DICTIONARY

OF

QUOTATIONS.

A.

ABSENCE.

Love reckons hours for months, and days for years;

And little absence is an age.

every

Dryden's Amphitrion.

Dryden's Aurenzebe.

All flowers will droop in absence of the sun

That wak'd their sweets.

Every moment

I'm from thy sight, the heart within my bosom

Moans like a tender infant in its cradle,

Whose nurse had left it. Otway's Venice Preserved.

O tell him I have sat these three long hours,
Counting the weary beatings of the clock,
Which slowly portion'd out the promis'd time
That brought him not to bless me with his sight.

Joanna Baillie's Rayner, a. 1, s. 1.

Yes,

The limner's art may trace the absent feature,
And give the eye of distant weeping faith

B

To view the form of its idolatry;

But oh! the scenes 'mid which they met and parted,
The thoughts, the recollections sweet and bitter,
Th' Elysian dreams of lovers, when they loved,
Who shall restore them?

Less lovely are the fugitive clouds of eve,

And not more vanishing.

Maturin's Bertram, a. 1, s. 5..

Bertram, Bertram !

How sweet it is to tell the listening night
The name beloved-it is a spell of power
To wake the buried slumberers of the heart,
Where memory lingers o'er the grave of passion
Watching its tranced sleep.

The thoughts of other days are rushing on me,
The loved, the lost, the distant, and the dead,
Are with me now, and I will mingle with them
'Till my sense fails, and my raised heart is wrapt
In secret suspension of mortality.
Ibid. a. 2. s. 3.

There's not an hour
Of day or dreaming night but I am with thee:
There's not a wind but whispers of thy name,
And not a flower that sleeps beneath the moon
But in its hues or fragrance tells a tale

Of thee.

Proctor's Mirandola, a. 1, s. 3.

'Tis scarcely

Two hours since ye departed: two long hours
To me, but only hours upon

the sun.

Byron's Cain, a. 3, s. 1.

Her fancy followed him through foaming waves
To distant shores, and she would sit and weep
At what a sailor suffers. Fancy, too,
Delusive most where warmest wishes are,
Would oft anticipate his glad return,

And dream of transports she was not to know.
Cowper's Task, b. 1.

ABSENCE-ABSENTEES-ACTIVITY.

Methinks I see thee straying on the beach,
And asking of the surge that bathes thy foot,
If ever it has wash'd our distant shore.

3

Cowper's Task, b. 1.

Not to understand a treasure's worth

Till time has stol'n away the slighted good,

Is cause of half the poverty we feel,

And makes the world the wilderness it is. Ibid, b. 6. Long did his wife,

Suckling her babe, her only one, look out

The way he went at parting, but he came not!

ABSENTEES.

We yet retain

Rogers' Italy.

Some small pre-eminence, we justly boast
At least superior jockeyship, and claim
The honors of the turf as all our own.
Go then, well worthy of the praise ye seek,
And show the shame ye might conceal at home,
In foreign eyes!-be grooms, and win the plate,
Where once your nobler fathers won a crown.
Cowper's Task, b. 2.

ACTIVITY.

How slow the time

To the warm soul, that, in the very instant

It forms, would execute, a great design!

Thomson's Coriolanus, a. 2, s 6.
The keen spirit

Seizes the prompt occasion, makes the thought

Start into instant action, and at once

Plans and performs, resolves and executes !

Hannah More's Daniel, pt. 1.

Due entrance he disdain'd, and in contempt,
At one slight bound high overleap'd all bound
Of hill or highest wall, and sheer within
Lights on his feet.

Milton's Paradise Lost, b. 4.

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