William Shenstone
William Shenstone
William Shenstonewas an English poet and one of the earliest practitioners of landscape gardening through the development of his estate, The Leasowes...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth18 November 1714
freedom broken people
What some people term Freedom is nothing else than a liberty of saying and doing disagreeable things. It is but carrying the notion a little higher, and it would require us to break and have a head broken reciprocally without offense.
reason approach awe
Misers, as death approaches, are heaping up a chest of reasons to stand in more awe of him.
love-is various
Love is a pleasing but a various clime.
mother may invention
Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.
beautiful distance eye
However, I think a plain space near the eye gives it a kind of liberty it loves; and then the picture, whether you choose the grand or beautiful, should be held up at its proper distance. Variety is the principal ingredient in beauty; and simplicity is essential to grandeur.
hands stupidity assurance
Bashfulness is more frequently connected with good sense than we find assurance; and impudence, on the other hand, is often the mere effect of downright stupidity.
doe intimacy sensitive
Deference often shrinks and withers as much upon the approach of intimacy as the sensitive plant does upon the touch of one's finger.
compliment indirect deference
Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
children men fists
Some men are called sagacious, merely on account of their avarice; whereas a child can clench its fist the moment it is born.
character giving almighty
Avarice is the most oppose of all characters to that of God Almighty, whose alone it is to give and not receive.
perfect assurance
Immoderate assurance is perfect licentiousness.
opportunity garden epic
In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.
kind flattery applause
Flattery of the verbal kind is gross. In short, applause is of too coarse a nature to be swallowed in the gross, though the extract or tincture be ever so agreeable.
revenge anger fighting
Anger and the thirst of revenge are a kind of fever; fighting and lawsuits, bleeding,--at least, an evacuation. The latter occasions a dissipation of money; the former, of those fiery spirits which cause a preternatural fermentation.