Edmund Waller: Less pleasure take brave minds in battles won

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
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Edmund Waller
From A Panegyric
Less pleasure take brave minds in battles won,
Than in restoring such as are undone;
Tigers have courage, and the rugged bear,
But man alone can, whom he conquers, spare.
To pardon willing, and to punish loath,
You strike with one hand, but you heal with both;
Lifting up all that prostrate lie, you grieve
You cannot make the dead again to live.

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