“Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled,Followed their mercenary callingAnd took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended;They stood, and earth's foundations stay;What God abandoned, these defended,And saved the sum of things for pay.”

“Good creatures, do you love your lives And have you ears for sense?Here is a knife like other knives, That cost me eighteen pence. I need but stick it in my heart And down will come the sky,And earth's foundations will depart And all you folk will die.”

“Diffugere NivesHorace, Odes, iv, 7The snows are fled away, leaves on the shawsAnd grasses in the mead renew their birth,The river to the river-bed withdraws,And altered is the fashion of the earth.The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fearAnd unapparelled in the woodland play.The swift hour and the brief prime of the yearSay to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of springTreads summer sure to die, for hard on hersComes autumn with his apples scattering;Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;Come we where Tullus and where Ancus areAnd good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall addThe morrow to the day, what tongue has told?Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has hadThe fingers of no heir will ever hold.When thou descendest once the shades among,The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chainThe love of comrades cannot take away.”

“The time you won your town the raceWe chaired you through the market-place;Man and boy stood cheering by,And home we brought you shoulder-high.Today, the road all runners come,Shoulder-high we bring you home,And set you at your threshold down,Townsman of a stiller town.Smart lad, to slip betimes awayFrom fields where glory does not stay,And early though the laurel growsIt withers quicker than the rose.Eyes the shady night has shutCannot see the record cut,And silence sounds no worse than cheersAfter earth has stopped the ears.Now you will not swell the routOf lads that wore their honours out,Runners whom renown outranAnd the name died before the man.So set, before its echoes fade,The fleet foot on the sill of shade,And hold to the low lintel upThe still-defended challenge-cup.And round that early-laurelled headWill flock to gaze the strengthless dead,And find unwithered on its curlsThe garland briefer than a girl’s.”

“The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book."(Introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, 3 October 1892)”

“How clear, how lovely bright,How beautiful to sight Those beams of morning play;How heaven laughs out with gleeWhere, like a bird set free,Up from the eastern sea Soars the delightful day.To-day I shall be strong,No more shall yield to wrong, Shall squander life no more;Days lost, I know not how,I shall retrieve them now;Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before.Ensanguining the skiesHow heavily it dies Into the west away;Past touch and sight and soundNot further to be found,How hopeless under ground Falls the remorseful day.”

“Stars, I have seen them fall,But when they drop and dieNo star is lost at allFrom all the star-sown sky.The toil of all that beHelps not the primal fault;It rains into the seaAnd still the sea is salt.”