How few persons, favored by every element, safely make the promised port with swelling sails, and with all their wishes freighted!  Yet even these few persons who do safely make the promised port with all their wishes freighted, soon complain.  Though they are free from misfortunes, yet (though and yet, corresponding conjunctions, form only one connexion) they are not free from the course of nature, for they still are men; and when is man secure?  Time is as fatal to him, as a storm is to the mariner.—­The rush of years beats down their strength; (that is, the strength of these few;) and their numberless escapes end in ruin:  and then their proud success only plants new terrors on the victor’s brow.  What pain it is to them to quit the world, just as they have made it to be their own world; when their nests are built so high, and when they are downed so deeply!—­They who build beneath the stars, build too low for their own safety.

REFLECTIONS ON A SCULL.—­LORD BYRON.

    Remove yon scull from out the scattered heaps. 
    Is that a temple, where a God may dwell? 
  Why, ev’n the worm at last disdains her shattered cell! 
    Look on its broken arch, its ruined wall,
    Its chambers desolate, and portals foul;
    Yes, this was once ambition’s airy hall,
    The dome of thought, the palace of the soul. 
    Behold, through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
    The gay recess of wisdom and of wit,
    And passion’s host, that never brooked control. 
    Can all, saint, sage, or sophist ever writ,
  People this lonely tower, this tenement refit?

TRANSPOSED.

Remove thou yonder scull out from the scattered heaps.  Is that a temple, where a God may dwell?  Why, even the worm at last disdains her shattered cell!  Look thou on its broken arch, and look thou on its ruined wall, and on its desolate chambers, and on its foul portals:—­yes, this scull was once ambition’s airy hall; (it was) the dome of thought, the palace of the soul.  Behold thou, through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole, the gay recess of wisdom and of wit, and passion’s host, which never brooked control.  Can all the works which saints, or sages, or sophists have ever written, repeople this lonely tower, or can they refit this tenement?

For your future exercises in parsing, you may select pieces from the English Reader, or any other grammatical work.  I have already hinted, that parsing in poetry, as it brings more immediately into requisition the reasoning faculties, than parsing in prose, will necessarily tend more rapidly to facilitate your progress:  therefore it is advisable that your future exercises in this way, be chiefly confined to the analysis of poetry.  Previous to your attempting to parse a piece of poetry, you ought always to transpose it, in a manner similar to the examples just presented; and then it can be as easily analyzed as prose.