work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
5750,"",HDIS (Poetry),2004-01-02 00:00:00 UTC,"In vain, to thy white standard gathering round,
Wit, Worth, and Parts and Eloquence are found:
In vain, to push to birth thy great design,
Contending chiefs, and hostile virtues join;
All, from conflicting ranks, of power possesst
To rouse, to melt, or to inform the breast.
Where seasoned tools of Avarice prevail,
A Nation's eloquence, combined, must fail:
Each flimsy sophistry by turns they try;
The plausive argument, the daring lie,
The artful gloss, that moral sense confounds,
The' acknowledged thirst of gain that honour wounds:
Bane of ingenuous minds!--the' unfeeling sneer,
Which sudden turns to stone the falling tear:
They search assiduous, with inverted skill,
For forms of wrong, and precedents of ill;
With impious mockery wrest the sacred page,
And glean up crimes from each remoter age:
Wrung Nature's tortures, shuddering, while you tell,
From scoffing fiends bursts forth the laugh of hell;
In Britain's senate, Misery's pangs give birth
To jests unseemly, and to horrid mirth--
Forbear!--thy virtues but provoke our doom,
And swell the' account of vengeance yet to come;
For, not unmarked in Heaven's impartial plan,
Shall man, proud worm, contemn his fellow-man!
And injured Afric, by herself redresst,
Darts her own serpents at her tyrant's breast.
Each vice, to minds depraved by bondage known,
With sure contagion fastens on his own;
In sickly languors melts his nerveless frame,
And blows to rage impetuous Passion's flame:
Fermenting swift, the fiery venom gains
The milky innocence of infant veins;
There swells the stubborn will, damps learning's fire,
The whirlwind wakes of uncontrouled desire,
Sears the young heart to images of woe,
And blasts the buds of Virtue as they blow.
(ll. 19-56, pp. 123-4)",2011-02-05,15326,"","""Each vice, to minds depraved by bondage known, / With sure contagion fastens on his own.""","",2011-02-05 23:43:41 UTC,""
5750,"",HDIS,2004-01-03 00:00:00 UTC,"Nor less from the gay East, on essenced wings,
Breathing unnamed perfumes, Contagion springs;
The soft luxurious plague alike pervades
The marble palaces and rural shades;
Hence thronged Augusta builds her rosy bowers,
And decks in summer wreaths her smoky towers;
And hence, in summer bowers, Art's costly hand
Pours courtly splendours o'er the dazzled land:
The manners melt;--one undistinguished blaze
O'erwhelms the sober pomp of elder days;
Corruption follows with gigantic stride,
And scarce vouchsafes his shameless front to hide:
The spreading leprosy taints every part,
Infects each limb, and sickens at the heart.
Simplicity, most dear of rural maids,
Weeping resigns her violated shades:
Stern Independence from his glebe retires,
And anxious Freedom eyes her drooping fires;
By foreign wealth are British morals changed,
And Afric's sons, and India's, smile avenged.
(ll. 86-105, pp. 125-6)",,15330,•REVISIT. Does this belong? It is clearly metaphorical when the mind sickens--less so when the heart does.,Corruption may sicken the heart,"",2009-09-14 19:43:22 UTC,""
5871,Blank Slate,My own reading,2009-09-14 19:44:06 UTC,"The mind of a young woman lady should be clear and unsullied, like a sheet of white paper, or her own fairer face: lines of thinking destroy the dimples of beauty; aping the reason of man, they lose the exquisite, fascinating charm, in which consists their true empire.
(p. 57). ",,15611,"•The metaphor reworked in argument that follows. I have recorded this metaphor twice: it also appears in the database as a 'Body' metaphor.
•Note this citation in Ruth Perry's Women, Letters, and the Novel: a perfect governness should not permit letters to enter her house and never allows return answers, ""but what she is privy to; by which means, there is nothing we write we meed be ashamed of, were it legibly written on our Foreheads as well as Papers"" (133). From Hannah Wolley's The Gentlewoman's Companion (London 1673), p. 234. On the next page Perry observes, ""The governess was expected to try and control everything that passed through a girl's mind"" (134).","""The mind of a young woman lady should be clear and unsullied, like a sheet of white paper, or her own fairer face""",Writing,2009-09-14 19:44:06 UTC,In argument about what sort of reading women should undertake.