work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
7399,"",Reading,2013-06-05 19:41:01 UTC,"Yet man (fool man!) here buries all his thoughts;
Inters celestial hopes without one sigh;
Prisoner of earth, and pent beneath the moon,
Here pinions all his wishes; wing'd by Heaven
To fly at infinite; and reach it there
Where seraphs gather immortality,
On life's fair tree, fast by the throne of God.
What golden joys ambrosial clustering glow
In His full beam, and ripen for the just,
Where momentary ages are no more!
Where Time, and Pain, and Chance, and Death expire!
And is it in the flight of threescore years
To push eternity from human thought,
And smother souls immortal in the dust?
A soul immortal, spending all her fires,
Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness,
Thrown into tumult, raptured, or alarm'd,
At aught this scene can threaten, or indulge,
Resembles ocean into tempest wrought,
To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.
(ll. 135-154, pp. 40-1 in CUP edition)",,20389,"","""A soul immortal, spending all her fires, / Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness, / Thrown into tumult, raptured, or alarm'd, / At aught this scene can threaten, or indulge, / Resembles ocean into tempest wrought, / To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.""","",2013-06-05 19:41:01 UTC,Night the First
7408,"",Reading,2013-06-11 16:04:58 UTC,"Mark well, as foreign as these subjects seem,
What close connexion ties them to my theme.
First, what is true ambition? The pursuit
Of glory, nothing less than man can share.
Were they as vain as gaudy-minded man,
As flatulent with fumes of self-applause,
Their arts and conquests animals might boast,
And claim their laurel crowns as well as we;
But not celestial. Here we stand alone;
As in our form, distinct, pre-eminent:
If prone in thought, our stature is our shame,
And man should blush his forehead meets the skies.
The Visible and Present are for brutes,
A slender portion, and a narrow bound!
These Reason, with an energy Divine,
O'erleaps, and claims the Future and Unseen;
The vast Unseen, the Future fathomless!
When the great soul buoys up to this high point,
Leaving gross Nature's sediments below,
Then, and then only, Adam's offspring quits
The sage and hero of the fields and woods,
Asserts his rank, and rises into man.
This is ambition: this is human fire.
(ll. 234-256, p. 155 in CUP edition)",,20513,"","""These Reason, with an energy Divine, / O'erleaps, and claims the Future and Unseen; / The vast Unseen, the Future fathomless! / When the great soul buoys up to this high point, / Leaving gross Nature's sediments below, / Then, and then only, Adam's offspring quits / The sage and hero of the fields and woods, / Asserts his rank, and rises into man.""","",2013-06-11 16:04:58 UTC,Night the Sixth