Laudator Temporis Acti

Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar for the Country (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1949), p. 69 (August, on Hyla versicolor, the gray tree-frog):

Several times, out of a sheer selfish desire to make him acknowledge that, from a frog's point of view, I am good for something, I have elevated some tidbit, on the end of a straw, under his very nose. Twice he has snatched it casually; twice, when I became very insistent, he impatiently brushed it away with his foreleg. But usually he simply stares motionless and straight ahead after the fashion of the Buddha he so much resembles. Frogs, he tells me, do not need men. They can get along very well without them, would rather not acknowledge their existence. The sense of independence is worth more than an occasional supererogatory worm. Mankind, so far as frogs are concerned, serves no useful purpose. There is no teleological explanation for the human race's existence.

Hyla versicolor

H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun (October 8, 1928):

It always makes me melancholy to see the boys going to school. During the half hour before 9 o'clock they stagger through the square in front of my house in Baltimore with the despondent air of New Yorkers coming up from the ferries to work. It happens to be uphill, but I believe they'd lag as much if they were going down. Shakespeare, in fact, hints as much in the Seven Ages. In the afternoon, coming home, they leap and spring like gazelles. They are tired, but they are happy, and happiness in the young always takes the form of sharp and repeated contractions of the striped muscles, especially in the legs, arms and larynx.

The notion that schoolboys are generally content with their lot seems to me to be a sad delusion. They are, in the main, able to bear it, but they like it no more than a soldier enjoys life in a foxhole. The need to endure it makes actors of them; they learn how to lie—perhaps the most valuable thing, to a citizen of Christendom, that they learn in school. No boy genuinely loves and admires his teacher; the farthest he can go, assuming him to have all of his wits, is to tolerate her as he tolerates castor oil. She may be the loveliest flower in the whole pedagogical garden, but the most he can ever see in her is a jailer who might conceivably be worse.

Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7.144-146:

Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

Anna Mehler Paperny, "Press release's typo makes PMO the butt of jokes," Globe and Mail (August 19, 2009):

Languages are tricky creatures.

Jumping from one to another is fraught with potential for embarrassing linguistic slipups.

Just ask the Prime Minister's Office.

The PMO found itself in an awkward position yesterday when it realized it had sent out a press release Monday that inadvertently said the Prime Minister would make several public appearances in a "Place of Many Excrement-Covered Bottoms."

The release meant to say Iqaluit - the 7,000-person capital of the territory of Nunavut, where yesterday the Prime Minister did indeed make multiple media appearances.

But instead it said Iqualuit, which adds a u after the q and means something entirely different.

The root word "iquq," explained Sandra Inutiq, a policy analyst with Nunavut's language commissioner, refers to "fecal matter remaining on the outer layer of the anus post-defecation."

The suffix "aluit" makes it a plural or suggests "the speaker is surprised or disturbed," implying a surprising or disturbing number of people with unclean behinds.

See Guy Bordin, Lexique analytique de l'anatomie humaine: inuktitut-français-anglais (Louvain: Peeters, 2004), p. 66, s.v. iqquq:

Selon Spalding (1998:30), iquq désigne en aivilingmiutitut les excréments adhérant à l'anus ou aux poils périanaux. Ex: iquqtuq, qui s'est essuyé le derrière.

Bordin's citation is to A. Spalding, Inuktitut—A Multi-dialectal Outline Dictionary (with an Aivilingmiutaq base) (Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 1998), unavailable to me.

Related posts:

• Matshishkapeu
  
• Vespasian

Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching (New York: Knopf, 1950), p. 244:

The same arduous type of challenge, without compulsion but with all its difficulty, was given to one of the most distinguished of American educators, Mr. Abraham Flexner. His adviser, Professor Morris of Johns Hopkins, told him that if he wanted to master Greek, he should get a compact little shelf of Greek books and read nothing but Greek for five years. "Read the daily papers to keep up with the world," he said, "but don't read books in any other language. Read Greek only." The ambitious young student took this hard advice, and, like the pupils of Agassiz, he gazed at the intricate subject until he really felt at home in it. Just as they could take a new specimen and see a thousand things which would escape the untrained eye, so he could pick up a book (an immortal book, a permanently valuable book) in Greek, and read it through with ease and pleasure. Such efforts are painful; but without effort there is no reward.

Samuel Johnson, letter to Mrs. Thrale (Litchfield, August 14, 1769):

They have cut down the trees in George Lane. Evelyn in his book of Forest trees tells us of wicked men that cut down trees and never prospered afterwards, yet nothing has deterred these audacious aldermen from violating the Hamadryads of George Lane.

See the explanatory notes in Bruce Redford, ed. The Letters of Samuel Johnson, Volume I: 1731-1772 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 327:

George Lane, in central Litchfield, connected Stowe Street to Castle Ditch. SJ's foster-mother lived there, and he "used to call...and eat fruit in the garden, which was full of trees" (Johns. Misc. I.130; Clifford, 1955, p. 28).

"One might fill a just volume with the Histories of Groves that were violated by wicked Men, who came to fatal periods" (John Evelyn, Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees, 3d ed., 1679, p. 268).

Related posts: Sorbs and Medlars; So Foul a Deed; Like Another Erysichthon; The Fate of Old Trees; Scandalous Misuse of the Globe; The Groves Are Down; Massacre; Executioners; Anagyrasian Spirit; Butchers of Our Poor Trees; Cruel Axes; Odi et Amo; Kentucky Chainsaw Massacre; Hornbeams; Protection of Sacred Groves; Lex Luci Spoletina; Turullius and the Grove of Asclepius; Caesarian Section; Death of a Noble Pine; Two Yew Trees in Chilthorne, Somerset; The Fate of the Shrubbery at Weston; The Trees Are Down; Hornbeams; Sad Ravages in the Woods; Strokes of Havoc; Maltreatment of Trees; Arboricide; An Impious Lumberjack; Erysichthon in Ovid; Erysichthon in Callimachus; Vandalism.

David Norton wrote in an email:

Reading the item you posted for August 26th, I recalled my visit to Stoke Poges and the monument there to Thomas Gray, which misquotes what is perhaps his most famous stanza:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Gray wrote "Awaits", and few critics (and no scholar) would prefer the mason's version. I hate to think how many poets and scholars will never rest easy because their gravestones misquote them--or others.

David also drew my attention to textual notes on this corruption at The Thomas Gray Archive.

Robert Buchanan (1841-1901), The Bookworm:

With spectacles upon his nose,
    He shuffles up and down;
Of antique fashion are his clothes,
    His napless hat is brown.
A mighty watch, of silver wrought,
    Keeps time in sun or rain
To the dull ticking of the thought
    Within his dusty brain.

To see him at the bookstall stand
    And bargain for the prize,
With the odd sixpence in his hand
    And greed in his gray eyes!
Then, conquering, grasp the book half blind,
    And take the homeward track,
For fear the man should change his mind,
    And want the bargain back!

The waves of life about him beat,
    He scarcely lifts his gaze,
He hears within the crowded street
    The wash of ancient days.
If ever his short-sighted eyes
    Look forward, he can see
Vistas of dusty Libraries
    Prolonged eternally.

But think not as he walks along
    His brain is dead and cold;
His soul is thinking in the tongue
    Which Plato spake of old;
And while some grinning cabman sees
    His quaint shape with a jeer,
He smiles, — for Aristophanes
    Is joking in his ear.

Around him stretch Athenian walks,
    And strange shapes under trees;
He pauses in a dream and talks
    Great speech, with Socrates.
Then, as the fancy fails — still mesh'd
    In thoughts that go and come —
Feels in his pouch, and is refresh'd
    At touch of some old tome.

The mighty world of humankind
    Is as a shadow dim,
He walks through life like one half blind,
    And all looks dark to him;
But put his nose to leaves antique,
    And hold before his sight
Some press'd and withered flowers of Greek,
    And all is life and light.

A blessing on his hair so gray,
    And coat of dingy brown!
May bargains bless him every day,
    As he goes up and down;
Long may the bookstall-keeper's face,
    In dull times, smile again,
To see him round with shuffling pace
    The corner of the lane!

A good old Ragpicker is he,
    Who, following morn and eve
The quick feet of Humanity,
    Searches the dust they leave.
He pokes the dust, he sifts with care,
    He searches close and deep;
Proud to discover, here and there,
    A treasure in the heap!

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, An Unspoken Farewell:

When my time comes, I will not say with Cassandra, ἀρκείτω βίος, 'Let life suffice', but with the unknown speaker of a fragment of Aeschylus, 'Life's bivouac is o'er, διαπεφρούρηται βίος. These words of a warrior remind me of Victor Hugo's 'J'ai servi, j'ai veillé', 'I have served, I have watched'—served as a teacher, watched as a critic; and of Landor's 'warming both hands before the <bivouac> fire of life.' Διαπεφρούρηται βίος shall be my epitaph.

Quoted in The Letters of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, edited by Ward W. Briggs, Jr. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 324.

The compound verb διαφρουρέω is a hapax legomenon. Liddell-Scott-Jones s.v. translate "to keep one's post," with the fragment from Aeschylus as the only citation. The simplex verb φρουρέω = "watch, guard" occurs often. G. Italie, Index Aeschyleus, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1964), p. 71, translates the fragment into Latin as vitae vigilia peracta est.

Unfortunately, Gildersleeve's instructions for his epitaph were not carried out to the letter. Briggs (loc. cit.) notes:

It is the epitaph on his gravestone at Plot 58 of the University Cemetery in Charlottesville, but it is misspelled, with an English "V" in place of the upsilon.

An unfortunate misprint in the epitaph of so exact a Greek scholar. Briggs (p. 353):

The apocryphal story of his desire to be buried in Charlottesville after death since he had been "buried" there for two decades of his life has been the most durable of the many anecdotes about him.

Gildersleeve taught Greek at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville from 1856 to 1876. I studied Greek there in the 1970s, but unfortunately I never saw Gildersleeve's tomb.

The etymology of bivouac is interesting. See the Online Etymology Dictionary:

1702, from Fr., ult. from Swiss/Alsatian biwacht "night guard," from bei- "double, additional" + wacht "guard." Original meaning was an army that stayed up on night watch; sense of "outdoor camp" is 1853. Not a common word in Eng. before the Napoleonic Wars.

The phrase "the bivouac of Life" occurs in Longfellow's poem A Psalm of Life:

In the world's broad field of battle,
    In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
    Be a hero in the strife!

Gildersleeve was "a hero in the strife" of the Civil War. As he put it, "The right to teach Southern youth for nine months was earned by sharing the fortunes of their fathers and brothers at the front for three." In 1864, Gildersleeve was wounded at Weyer's Cave in the thigh by a Spencer bullet, so badly that he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve

---

One could make an interesting blog out of excerpts from Gildersleeve's Brief Mention column in American Journal of Philology, with translations and notes. C.W.E. Miller collected some excerpts in Selections from the Brief Mention of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930), but many gems remain to be rediscovered. See Paul Shorey, "Fifty Years of Classical Studies in America," Transactions of the American Philological Association 50 (1919) 33-61 (at 60):

[Y]ou can hardly pick up a number of Brief Mention, even among those which an unfriendly critic might deem the most discursive, frivolous, and repetitious, without learning something about Greek or the history of literature or linguistic analysis and literary criticism, that is worth knowing and that you did not know, without receiving some suggestion that will prove of helpful application in your own reading and study.

Montaigne, Essays I.37 (Of Cato the Younger, tr. Donald M. Frame):

I do not share that common error of judging another by myself. I easily believe that another man may have qualities different from mine. Because I feel myself tied down to one form, I do not oblige everybody to espouse it, as all others do. I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life; and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us. I am as ready as you please to acquit another man from sharing my conditions and principles. I consider him simply in himself, without relation to others; I mold him to his own model. I do not fail, just because I am not continent, to acknowledge sincerely the continence of the Feuillants and the Capuchins, and to admire the manner of their life. I can very well insinuate myself by imagination into their place, and I love and honor them all the more because they are different from me. I have a singular desire that we should each be judged in ourselves apart, and that I may not be measured in conformity with the common patterns.

Montaigne, Essays III.10 (On Husbanding Your Will, tr. Donald M. Frame):

When my will gives me over to one party, it is not with so violent an obligation that my understanding is infected by it. In the present broils of this state, my own interest has not made me blind to either the laudable qualities in our adversaries or those that are reproachable in the men I have followed. People adore everything that is on their side; as for me, I do not even excuse most of the things that I see on mine. A good work does not lose its grace for pleading against my cause.

....

I want the advantage to be for us, but I do not fly into a frenzy if it is not. I adhere firmly to the healthiest of the parties, but I do not seek to be noted as especially hostile to the others and beyond the bounds of the general reason.

Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.6.4 (tr. E.C. Marchant):

"And what of the man who is such a keen man of business that he has no leisure for anything but the selfish pursuit of gain?"

"We must avoid him too, I think. There is no profit in knowing him."

Τί δ᾽; ὅστις διὰ τὸν ἔρωτα τοῦ χρηματίζεσθαι μηδὲ πρὸς ἓν ἄλλο σχολὴν ποιεῖται ἢ ὁπόθεν αὐτός τι κερδανεῖ;

Ἀφεκτέον καὶ τούτου, ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ· ἀνωφελὴς γὰρ ἂν εἴη τῶι χρωμένῳ.

Martial 1.15, tr. William Hay:

Thou, whom (if faith or honour recommends
A friend) I rank amongst my dearest friends,
Remember, you are now almost threescore;
Few days of life remain, if any more.
Defer not, what no future time insures:
And only what is past, esteem that yours.
Successive cares and trouble for you stay;
Pleasure not so; it nimbly fleets away.
Then seize it fast; embrace it ere it flies;
In the embrace it vanishes and dies.
"I'll live to-morrow," will a wise man say?
To-morrow is too late, then live to-day.

The same, tr. Goldwin Smith:

Friend of my heart—and none of all the band
Has to that name older or better right—
Julius, thy sixtieth winter is at hand;
Far spent is now life's day, and near the night.

Delay not what thou would'st recall too late;
That which is past, that only call thy own:
Cares without end and tribulations wait,
Joy tarrieth not, but scarcely come, is flown.

Then grasp it quickly, firmly to thy heart;
Though firmly grasped, too oft it slips away;
To talk of living is not wisdom's part:
To-morrow is too late: live thou to-day!

The original Latin:

O mihi post nullos, Iuli, memorande sodales,
    si quid longa fides canaque iura valent,
bis iam paene tibi consul tricensimus instat,
    et numerat paucos vix tua vita dies.
non bene distuleris videas quae posse negari,
    et solum hoc ducas, quod fuit, esse tuum.
exspectant curaeque catenatique labores,
    gaudia non remanent, sed fugitiva volant.
haec utraque manu conplexuque adsere toto:
    saepe fluunt imo sic quoque lapsa sinu.
non est, crede mihi, sapientis dicere 'Vivam':
    sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie.

---

Martial 5.58, tr. Abraham Cowley:

To-morrow you will live, you always cry:
In what far country does this morrow lie,
That 't is so mighty long ere it arrive?
Beyond the Indies does this morrow live?
'T is so far fetch'd this morrow, that I fear
'T will be both very old and very dear.
To-morrow I will live, the fool does say:
To-day itself's too late; the wise liv'd yesterday.

The same, tr. Edward Sherburne:

Still, still thou cry'st, "Tomorrow I'll live well:"
But when will this to morrow come? canst tell?
How far is't hence? or where's it to be found?
Or upon Parthian or Armenian ground?
Priam's or Nestor's years by this 't has got;
I wonder for how much it might be bought?
Thou'lt live to morrow?—'Tis too late to day:
He's wise who yesterday, "I liv'd," can say.

The original Latin:

Cras te victurum, cras dicis, Postume, semper.
    dic mihi, cras istud, Postume, quando venit?
quam longe cras istud, ubi est? aut unde petendum?
    numquid apud Parthos Armeniosque latet?
iam cras istud habet Priami vel Nestoris annos.
    cras istud quanti, dic mihi, possit emi?
cras vives? hodie iam vivere, Postume, serum est:
    ille sapit quisquis, Postume, vixit heri.

From the movie Good Will Hunting:

Sean: So what do you really want to do?
Will: I wanna be a shepherd.
Sean: Really.
Will: I wanna move up to Nashua, get a nice little spread, get some sheep and tend to them.
Sean: Maybe you should go do that.

William Byrd, The Herdman's Happy Life:

What pleasure have great princes
More dainty to their choice
Than herdmen wild, who careless
In quiet life rejoice?
And fortune's fate not fearing,
Sing sweet in summer morning.
Their dealings plain and rightful,
Are void of all deceit;
They never know how spiteful
It is to kneel and wait
On favourite presumptuous,
Whose pride is vain and sumptuous.
All day their flocks each tendeth,
At night they take their rest,
More quiet than who sendeth
His ship into the east,
Where gold and pearl are plenty,
But getting very dainty.
For lawyers and their pleading,
They 'steem it not a straw;
They think that honest meaning,
Is of itself a law;
Where conscience judgeth plainly,
They spend no money vainly.
Oh, happy who thus liveth!
Not caring much for gold;
With clothing which sufficeth,
To keep him from the cold.
Though poor and plain his diet,
Yet merry it is and quiet.

Joseph Farquharson, Leaving the Hills

Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: Trivia, More Trivia, Afterthoughts, Last Words (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945), p. 107 (Guilt, from More Trivia):

What should I think of? I asked myself as I opened my umbrella. How should I occupy my imagination that harsh, dusky, sloshy, winter afternoon, as I walked to Bedford Square? Should I think of Arabia; of Albatrosses, or of those great Condors who sleep on their outspread wings in the high white air above the Andes?

But a sense of guilt oppressed me. What had I done, or left undone? And the shadowy figures that seemed to menace and pursue me? Yes, I had wronged them; it was again those Polish Poets, it was Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski;—and I'd never read one word of all their works!

I received this email earlier this week and rescued it from the Spam folder:

Mr Micheal,

how are you doing today and how s things moving sir.sir the main reason i am here s to help me to save my family from puberty.sir i than God i have find your email.please my family don,t have money to care for me and my youngers sister and brothers even because of the puberty all of us have stop schooling.please i want you to help me to save my family from puberty.please i want you to send me money or credit card, so that i can get money to help my family from puberty.Mr Micheal i need your help,please help me .samuel s my name.i am looking forward to hear from you soon Mr Micheal.

No amount of money, alas, can save Mr. Samuel's family from puberty. Even if it could, the milk of human kindness has dried up in my breast. I feel today like Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance:

Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Terminus:

It is time to be old,
To take in sail:—
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: "No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
Fancy departs: no more invent,
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
There's not enough for this and that,
Make thy option which of two,
Economize the failing river,
Not the less revere the Giver,
Leave the many and hold the few.
Timely wise accept the terms,
Soften the fall with wary foot;
A little while
Still plan and smile,
And,—fault of novel germs,—
Mature the unfallen fruit.
Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once,
The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,—
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb."
As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
"Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed."

Tibullus 1.1.33-34 (tr. J.P. Postgate):

But ye, ye thieves and wolves, have mercy on my scanty flocks; from great herds must ye take your spoil.

at vos exiguo pecori, furesque lupique,
  parcite: de magno est praeda petenda grege.

Robert Maltby, Tibullus: Elegies. Text, Introduction and Commentary (Cambridge: Francis Cairns, 2002), ad loc. (p. 133):

The couplet is an example of auersio (ἀποπομπή), a prayer that evil should be averted from one's self onto others, cf. Cat. 63.92-3 procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo:/ alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos, Priap. 86.19-21 quare hinc, o pueri, malas abstinete rapinas./ uicinus prope diues est negligensque Priapus:/ inde sumite. Further examples in N-H on Hor. Carm. 1.21.13 and Fedeli on Prop. 3.8.20. Here the prayer is addressed indirectly to Pales.

I have a minor clarification on a point of terminology. Richard Wünsch was apparently the first to use the terms apopompē (ἀποπομπή) and epipompē (ἐπιπομπή) to describe two different ways of banishing evil. See his "Zur Geisterbannung im Altertum," Festschrift zur Jahrhundertfeier der Universität zu Breslau = Mitteilungen der Schlesischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde 13/14 (1911) 9-32. Wünsch used apopompē to mean simply driving away evil, epipompē to mean driving away evil onto someone or something else.

In most of the exorcisms recorded in the Gospels, Jesus drove demons away from the possessed — this is apopompē ("sending away"). But at Gadara (or Gerasa or Gergesa, Matthew 8.30-32, par. Mark 5.11-13 and Luke 8.32-33), Jesus drove the demons into a herd of pigs — this is epipompē ("sending to or against"). The examples from Tibullus, Catullus, and the Priapeia adduced by Maltby are all examples of epipompē, not apopompē.

There is another example in Tibullus, at 1.6.85 (haec aliis maledicta cadant = "may these curses fall on others"). See Maltby ad loc. (p. 279):

the curse of an unhappy old age is averted on to others; for this form of apotropaic prayer, cf. Cat. 63.92-3 procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo:/ alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos.

For more on this topic see my web page on Epipompē, to which I will add these two examples from Tibullus soon.

Donald Culross Peattie, Flowering Earth (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1939; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 22:

What we love, when on a summer day we step into the coolness of a wood, is that its boughs close up behind us. We are escaped, into another room of life. The wood does not live as we live, restless and running, panting after flesh, and even in sleep tossing with fears. It is aloof from thoughts and instincts; it responds, but only to the sun and wind, the rock and the stream—never, though you shout yourself hoarse, to propaganda, temptation, reproach, or promises. You cannot mount a rock and preach to a tree how it shall attain the kingdom of heaven. It is already closer to it, up there, than you will grow to be. And you cannot make it see the light, since in the tree's sense you are blind. You have nothing to bring it, for all the forest is self-sufficient; if you burn it, cut, hack through it with a blade, it angrily repairs the swathe with thorns and weeds and fierce suckers. Later there are good green leaves again, toiling, adjusting, breathing—forgetting you.

Asher Brown Durand, Monument Mountain, Berkshires

Palladas, Greek Anthology 9.394, tr. W.R. Paton:

Gold, father of flatterers, son of pain and care, it is fear to have thee and pain not to have thee.

Χρυσέ, πάτερ κολάκων, ὀδύνης καὶ φροντίδος υἱέ,
  καὶ τὸ ἔχειν σε, φόβος· καὶ μὴ ἔχειν σ᾿, ὀδύνη.

Latin translation by Samuel Johnson:

Mater adulantum prolesque, Pecunia, curae,
  Teque frui timor est, teque carere dolor.

French translation by Pierre de Ronsard:

0 Mère des flatteurs, Richesse,
Fille du soin et de tristesse,
T'avoir est une grande peur
Et ne t'avoir, grande douleur.

Thanks very much to Michael Hendry for providing me with the Greek text of Palladas' epigrams in electronic form.

Donald Culross Peattie, Flowering Earth (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1939; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 6:

There are always some of us, not a few, in every generation, who go over wholly to the green flag. It is such a passionless fealty, so reticent a love, that neither do trumpets sound for it nor quarrels arise from it. Only, you will find that those who have pledged allegiance are happy about it in quiet.

Richard Wilbur, Green:

Tree-leaves which, till the growing season's done,
Change into wood the powers of the sun,

Take from that radiance only reds and blues.
Green is a color that they cannot use,

And so their rustling myriads are seen
To wear all summer an extraneous green,

A green with no apparent role, unless
To be the symbol of a great largesse

Which has no end, though autumns may revoke
That shade from yellowed ash and rusted oak.

Ivan Shishkin, Willows Lit Up By the Sun

Some prayers, from The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume I: Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E.L. McAdam, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).

A Prayer Before Beginning Any New Study (p. 48):

Almighty God, in whose hands are all the powers of man; who givest understanding, and takest it away; who, as it seemeth good unto Thee, enlightenest the thoughts of the simple, and darkenest the meditations of the wise, be present with me in my studies and enquiries.

Grant, O Lord, that I may not lavish away the life which Thou hast given me on useless trifles, not waste it in vain searches after things which thou hast hidden from me.

Enable me, by thy Holy Spirit, so to shun sloth and negligence, that every day may discharge part of the task which Thou hast allotted me; and so further with Thy help that labour which, without thy help, must be ineffectual, that I may obtain, in all my undertakings, such success as will most promote thy glory, and the salvation of my own soul, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.

After Time Negligently and Unprofitably Spent (p. 49):

О Lord, in whose hands are life and death, by whose power I am sustained, and by whose mercy I am spared, look down upon me with pity. Forgive me, that I have this day neglected the duty which thou hast assigned to it, and suffered the hours, of which I must give account, to pass away without any endeavour to accomplish thy will, or to promote my own salvation. Make me to remember, О God, that every day is thy gift, and ought to be used according to thy command. Grant me, therefore, so to repent of my negligence, that I may obtain mercy from Thee, and pass the time which Thou shalt yet allow me, in diligent performance of thy commands, through Jesus Christ. Amen.

Study of Tongues (p. 58):

Almighty God, giver of all knowledge, enable me so to pursue the study of tongues, that I may promote thy glory and my own salvation.

Bless my endeavours, as shall seem best unto Thee; and if it shall please Thee to grant me the attainment of my purpose, preserve me from sinful pride; take not thy Holy Spirit from me, but give me a pure heart and humble mind, through Jesus Christ. Amen.