Grateless

Knowe Lupus this, lest she thee call churle gratelesse, and vnkinde.

Nor Guasco, nor Rudolfo left behinde, / Nor th'one nor th'other Guido, famous both, / Nor Eurard, nor Gernier must slip my mind, / To passe in gratelesse silence more then loth, / Whither do you louers and spouses kind?

Corruption’s loathsome touch hath not yet marr’d / The beauty of Eve’s youngest, fresh as when / Beside yon priestless altar late he stood, / And, in the pious fervour of his soul), / Warm with the hope of an exalted faith, / And breathing forth the prayerful homage, paid / The votive off’ring grateful to his God. Sad lesson of mortality, and taught / At sadder cost—the fearful risk of heav’n. Ah, grateless unbeliever!

Thence passing through the land of the Sabines, / Divided by the lofty Appenines, / Rising, she found the world-renownèd Rome, / And grateful welcom’d, made it long a home, / Where, honour’d she, respected, all were bound / To cultivate some portion of the ground, / In recognition of her most just claims, / The least of which is, ’tis her power that tames / Horse, ox, and heifer, for man’s uses, though / Not for those uses which their blood lets flow / In crimson streams, with which life ebbs away— / A cruel practice is this art to slay! / But for those uses, perhaps not enjoined, / For benefit implied of all mankind, / From their mark’d instincts, making them to him / Obedient and submissive the yoke in; / And trustful of his care and of his hand, / Grateless, uplifted their lives to demand, / When he, O horrid! taketh up the knife, / And therewith strikes the blow that ends their life!

“I am duly grateful to those necessities which inclined your valour to such leniency. I think,” he added with a sneer, “it is not the first time the poor Jew’s usefulness will have saved the poor Jew’s neck!” / Oswald walked away to the balcony, and stood reflecting for a moment. Then he came back. “Isaac,” he said, “it serves no purpose for us to quarrel. I have gone so far with you I must needs go still a little farther. You, who know so much, must needs know a little more; therefore, listen to me now, and, when I have done, then if by your cunning—whether it comes from heaven or hell I will not ask—if you can get me from the shadow of this oncoming cloud that blights my outlook and chills my courage; if you can twist these adverse circumstances that beset me into the shape I would, you will save more than you yet think of, nor find me grateless.”

Brute spread his hands helplessly: “To think soch a fine woman should have soch a grateless child!”

Here May and April flourish all year long in temperate pleasantness and grateful cool, their zephyrs soft, their skies serene and bright. Between the mount of Ossa and a spur of towering Olympus there is spread a valley full of freshness and of flowers, whose beauty Peneus, with his grateless child, increasingly enriches and augments with leaves of laurel and with silver streams.

[…] will you flee for the end of the aimless peasant or will you strike him down with an arrow kick if you delight for the peasant is grateless and I am grateful dead ha ha […]