Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces
And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even.
For all his hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry? ‘Tell me’, he wanted to say, ‘everything in the whole world’— for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry — but how speak to a man who does not see you?
In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details
Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us.
Orlando, it is true, was none of those who tread lightly the corantoe and lavolta; he was clumsy and a little absentminded. He much preferred the plain dances of his own country,
Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore.
The river had gained its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur spring
For when the dawn broke, which it did with unusual suddenness, the sky turning a pale yellow and the rain almost ceasing, he found himself on the banks of the Thames off Wapping. Now a sight of the most extraordinary nature met his eyes. Where, for three months and more, there had been solid ice of such thickness that it seemed permanent as stone, and a whole gay city had been stood on its pavement, was now a race of turbulent yellow waters.
