Common Thistle.... Misanthropy

Who would seek or prize
Delights that end in aching?
Who would trust to ties
That every hour are breaking?
Better far to be
In utter darkness lying,
Than be blest with light, and see
That light for ever flying.
All that’s bright must fade,—
The brightest still the fleetest,
All that’s sweet was made
But to be lost when sweetest!

Moore.

I had much rather see
A crested dragon or a basilisk,
Both are less poison to my eyes and nature.

Dryden.

Hate all, curse all: show charity to none;
But let the famished flesh slide from the bone,
Ere thou relieve the beggar: give to dogs
What thou deniest to men; let prisons swallow them,
Debts wither them to nothing: be men like blasted woods,
And may diseases lick up their false bloods.

Shakspeare.

I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind:
For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog,
That I might love thee something.

Shakspeare.

I’ll keep my way alone, and burn away—
Evil or good I care not, so I spread
Tremendous desolation on my road:
I’ll be remembered as huge meteors are;
From the dismay they scatter.

Proctor.

I see thou art implacable, more deaf
To prayers than winds and seas; yet winds and seas
Are reconciled at length, and sea to shore:
Thy anger, unappeasable, still rages
Eternal tempest never to be calm.

Milton.

Warped by the world in disappointment’s school.
In words too wise, in conduct there a fool;
Too firm to yield, and far too proud to stoop,
Doomed by his very virtues for a dupe,
He cursed those virtues as the cause of ill,
And not the traitors who betrayed him still;
Nor deemed that gifts bestowed on better men,
Had left him joy, and means to give again.
Feared, shunned, belied, ere youth had lost her force,
He hated men too much to feel remorse,
And thought the voice of wrath a sacred call,
To pay the injuries of some on all.

Byron.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

Shelley.

They too, who mid the scornful thoughts that dwell
In his rich fancy, tinging all its streams,
As if the Star of Bitterness which fell
On earth of old, and touched them with its beams,
Can track a spirit, which, though driven to hate,
From Nature’s hands came kind, affectionate;
And which, even now, struck as it is with blight,
Comes out, at times, in love’s own native light—
How gladly all, who’ve watched these struggling rays
Of a bright, ruined spirit through his lays,
Would here inquire, as from his own frank lips,
What desolating grief, what wrongs had driven
That noble nature into cold eclipse—
Like some fair orb, that, once a sun in heaven,
And born, not only to surprise, but cheer
With warmth and lustre all within its sphere,
Is now so quenched, that, of its grandeur, lasts
Naught but the wide cold shadow which it casts!

Moore.