“I did but see him and he disappeared,
I did but pluck the rose-bud and it fell,
A sorrow unforeseen and scarcely feared,
For ill can mortals their afflictions spell.”

'On the Death of my First and Dearest Child, Hector Philips' (1655), as reported in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 575

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Anglo-Welsh poet and translator 1632–1664

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