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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Skull

Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?

Shakespeare.

  • Look on its broken arch, its ruined wall,
  • Its chambers desolate, its portals foul;
  • Yes, this was once ambition’s airy hall,
  • The dome of thought, the palace of the soul.
  • Byron.

  • Thou hollow skull! what meanings lurk
  • Beneath that grin? ’tis but to say
  • Thy brain like mine was once at work
  • With thoughts that led thee far astray;
  • Longing for truth, you sought the day’s clear light,
  • But miserably stray’d in gloom and night.
  • Goethe.

  • O empty vault of former glory!
  • Where’er thou wert in time of old,
  • Thy surface tells thy living story
  • Though now so hollow, dead, and cold:
  • For in thy form is yet descried
  • The traces left of young desire;
  • The painter’s art, the statesman’s pride,
  • The muse’s song, the poet’s fire;
  • But these, forsooth, now seem to be
  • Mere lumps on thy periphery.
  • Dr. Forster.

  • These various organs show the place
  • Where friendship lov’d, where passion glow’d,
  • Where veneration grew in grace,
  • Where justice sway’d, where man was proud—
  • Whence wit its slippery sallies threw
  • On vanity, thereby defeated;
  • Where hope’s imaginary view
  • Of things to come (fond fool) is seated;
  • Where circumspection made us fear,
  • ’Mid gleams of joy some danger near.
  • Dr. Forster.