All your better deeds

Shall be in water writ, but this in marble.

Beaumont And Fletcher: Philaster. Act v. Sc. 3.

Forget thyself to marble.

John Milton (1608-1674): Il Penseroso. Line 42.

I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,

With vassals and serfs at my side.

Alfred Bunn (1790-1860): Song.

Where the statue stood

Of Newton, with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind forever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): The Prelude. Book iii.

Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,

Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,

Be thy intents wicked or charitable,

Thou comest in such a questionable shape

That I will speak to thee: I 'll call thee Hamlet,

King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!

Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell

Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,

Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,

Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd,

Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws

To cast thee up again. What may this mean,

That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel

Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,

Making night hideous, and we fools of nature

So horridly to shake our disposition

With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Hamlet. Act i. Sc. 4.

And the cold marble leapt to life a god.

Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868): The Belvedere Apollo.

The modest front of this small floor,

Believe me, reader, can say more

Than many a braver marble can,—

"Here lies a truly honest man!"

Richard Crashaw (Circa 1616-1650): Epitaph upon Mr. Ashton.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Sonnet lv.

The yielding marble of her snowy breast.

Edmund Waller (1605-1687): On a Lady passing through a Crowd of People.

Poets that lasting marble seek

Must come in Latin or in Greek.

Edmund Waller (1605-1687): Of English Verse.

And sleep in dull cold marble.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): King Henry VIII. Act iii. Sc. 2.

Then marble soften'd into life grew warm,

And yielding, soft metal flow'd to human form.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace. Epistle i. Book ii. Line 147.

Some write their wrongs in marble: he more just,

Stoop'd down serene and wrote them in the dust,—

Trod under foot, the sport of every wind,

Swept from the earth and blotted from his mind.

There, secret in the grave, he bade them lie,

And grieved they could not 'scape the Almighty eye.

Samuel Madden (1687-1765): Boulter's Monument.

His heart was one of those which most enamour us,—

Wax to receive, and marble to retain.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: Beppo. Stanza 34.

As when, O lady mine!

With chiselled touch

The stone unhewn and cold

Becomes a living mould.

The more the marble wastes,

The more the statue grows.

Michelangelo (1474-1564): Sonnet.

Who builds a church to God and not to fame,

Will never mark the marble with his name.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Moral Essays. Epistle iii. Line 285.

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend!

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): King Lear. Act i. Sc. 4.