Defend me, therefore, common sense, say I,
  From reveries so airy, from the toil
  Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
  And growing old in drawing nothing up.
Task, Bk.  III.  W. COWPER.

  Like Dead Sea fruit that tempts the eye,
  But turns to ashes on the lips!
Lalla Rookh:  The Fire Worshippers.  T. MOORE.

  Like to the apples on the Dead Sea’s shore,
  All ashes to the taste.
Childe Harold, Canto III.  LORD BYRON.

  At threescore winters’ end I died,
    A cheerless being, sole and sad;
  The nuptial knot I never tied,
    And wish my father never had.
From the Greek.  W. COWPER’S Trans.

  The cold—­the changed—­perchance the dead—­anew,
  The mourned, the loved, the lost—­too many!—­yet how few!
Childe Harold, Canto IV.  LORD BYRON.

               Do not drop in for an after-loss. 
  Ah, do not, when my heart hath ’scaped this sorrow,
  Come in the rearward of a conquered woe;
  Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
  To linger out a purposed overthrow.
Sonnet XC.  SHAKESPEARE.

I have not loved the world, nor the world me. Childe Harold, Canto III.  LORD BYRON.

DISCONTENT.

Past and to come seem best; things present worst. King Henry IV., Pt.  II.  Act i.  Sc. 3.  SHAKESPEARE.

  Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
  As if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit
  That could be moved to smile at anything.
Julius Caesar, Act i.  Sc. 2.  SHAKESPEARE.

  To sigh, yet feel no pain,
    To weep, yet scarce know why;
  To sport an hour with beauty’s chain,
    Then throw it idly by.
The Blue Stocking.  T. MOORE.

DISTANCE.

  Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
  Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky? 
  Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear
  More sweet than all the landscape smiling near?—­
  ’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
  And robes the mountain in its azure hue. 
  Thus, with delight, we linger to survey
  The promised joys of life’s unmeasured way.
Pleasures of Hope, Pt.  I.  T. CAMPBELL.

Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice;
Its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye,
Frozen by distance.
Address to Kilchurn Castle.  W. WORDSWORTH.

                                 How he fell
  From heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
  Sheer o’er the crystal battlements; from morn
  To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
  A summer’s day; and with the setting sun
  Dropt from the zenith like a falling star.
Paradise Lost, Bk.  I.  MILTON.

What! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom? Macbeth, Act iv.  Sc. 1.  SHAKESPEARE.