Samuel Richardson - Page of Clarissa with fragment of Lee's Oedipus lyrics

Mowbray, after this, amusing himself in our friend's library, which is, as thou knowest, chiefly cla**ical and dramatical, found out a pa**age in Lee's Oedipus, which he would needs have to be extremely apt; and in he came full fraught with the notion of the courage it would give the dying man, and read it to him. 'Tis poetical and pretty. This is it. ‘When the sun sets, shadows that shew'd at noon ‘But small, appear most long and terrible: ‘So when we think fate hovers o'er our heads, ‘Our apprehensions shoot beyond all bounds: ‘Owls, ravens, crickets, seem the watch of d**h; ‘Nature's worst vermin scare her godlike sons: ‘Echoes, the very leavings of a voice, ‘Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves. ‘Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus; ‘While we, fantastick dreamers, heave and puff, ‘And sweat with our imagination's weight.' He expected praises for finding this out. But Belton, turning his head from him, ‘Ah, Dick!' [said he] ‘these are not the reflections of a dying man!—What thou wilt one day feel, if it be what I now feel, will convince thee, that the evils before thee, and with thee, are more than the effects of imagination.'