Sorrow comes as in a circle And cannot be rolled up like a map.

-Child,Julia McWilliams
c.150  BC  'To My Wife 2', collected in  A Book of Chinese Verse (translated by N L Smith and R H Kotewall).

And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

-Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
  'Kubla Khan'.

Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end, where I begun.

-Donne,John
c.1595^1605  'A  Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', collected in Songs and Sonnets (1633).

   Round and round the circle Completing the charm So the knot be unknotted The cross be uncrossed The crooked be made straight And the curse be ended.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  The Family Reunion, pt.2, sc.3.

The British Labour movement is today, and for many years has been, working in a narrow circle of strikes that are looked upon, not as an expedient, and not as a means of propaganda, but as an ultimate aim.

-Engels, Friedrich
  Letter to Eduard Bernstein,17  Jul.

   Love, you shall perfect for me this child Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking: Within new limits now, arrange the world And square the circle: four walls and a ring.

-Heaney, SeamusJustin
  Death of a Naturalist,'Poem: For Marie'.

We've come full circle but the best remains the heart of the city, the greatest center of the greatest city, our Acropolis, where our Christmas tree is lighted.

-Moynihan, Daniel Patrick
  On NewYork's Rockefeller Centre. In the NewYork Times, 15 Mar.

Sothat finding myself at present inorabout onehundred and twenty degrees off east longitude from England, it bred in me a desire to proceed on the same easterly course till I had ended where I began, and so to have once made one circle round the globe of the earth, which would have been a voyage of voyages.

-Mundy, Peter
c.1640  Objections were raised and Mundy was unable to fulfil this aim. Travels (published c.1650).

   Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns.

-Pope, Alexander
  An Essay on Man, epistle1, l.25^6.

If there be no nobility of descent in a nation, it is all the more indispensable that there should be nobility of ascent; a character in them that bear rule, so fine and high and pure, that as men come within the circle of its influence, they involuntarily pay homagetothat which is the one pre-eminent distinctionöthe royalty of virtue.

-Potter, Henry Codman
  Washington centennial address, 30 Apr.

With each generation the entire race passes through the body of its womanhood as through a mould, reappearing withtheindeliblemarks ofthat mould upon it, that as the os cervix of woman, through which the head of the human infant passes at birth, forms a ring, determining for ever the size at birth of the human head†so exactly the intellectual capacity, the physical vigour, the emotional depth of woman, forms also an untranscendable circle, circumscribing with each successive generation the limits of expansion of the human race. 720

-Iron
Women and Labour, ch.3.

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimityand greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

-Stowe, Harriet (Elizabeth) ne¤  e Beecher
  'The Cathedral', in the Atlantic Monthly, Dec.

But we grow old, Ah! when shall all men's good Be each man's rule, and universal peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Through all the circle of the golden year.

-Tennyson
  'The GoldenYear', l.47^51.