Laudator Temporis Acti

A couple of months ago, while spending a day in the library at Georgia State University, I happened upon a wonderful book by Keith Thomas, his Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), from which I culled much information relevant to a topic which amounts to a monomania with me—protests against arboricide.

Now Thomas, in an essay in London Review of Books, Vol. 32, No. 11 (10 June 2010) 36-37, has given us a fascinating look at his decidedly low-tech, but highly effective, method of research:

When I go to libraries or archives, I make notes in a continuous form on sheets of paper, entering the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the length of the passage transcribed. These sliced-up pieces of paper pile up on the floor. Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic. Along with them go newspaper cuttings, lists of relevant books and articles yet to be read, and notes on anything else which might be helpful when it comes to thinking about the topic more analytically. If the notes on a particular topic are especially voluminous, I put them in a box file or a cardboard container or a drawer in a desk. I also keep an index of the topics on which I have an envelope or a file. The envelopes run into thousands.

....

My notes are voluminous because my interests have never been very narrowly focused. My subject is what I think of as the historical ethnography of early modern England. Equipped with questions posed by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, as well as by other historians, I try to look at virtually all aspects of early modern life, from the physical environment to the values and mental outlook of people at all social levels. Unfortunately, such diverse topics as literacy, numeracy, gestures, jokes, sexual morality, personal cleanliness or the treatment of animals, though central to my concerns, are hard to pursue systematically. They can't be investigated in a single archive or repository of information. Progress depends on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period. That makes them unsuitable subjects for a doctoral thesis, which has to be completed in a few years. But they are just the thing for a lifetime's reading. So when I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics. Even so, I find that, as my interests change, I have to go back to sources I read long ago, with my new preoccupations in mind.

....

When the time comes to start writing, I go through my envelopes, pick out a fat one and empty it out onto the table, to see what I have got. At this point a pattern usually forms. As Beatrice Webb rightly said, the very process of shuffling notes can be intellectually fertile. It helps one to make new connections and it raises questions to which one must try to find the answer. So after scrutinising my scraps of paper, I set about reading more systematically, often discovering in the process that somebody somewhere has already said most of what I thought I had found out for myself. If not too discouraged, I add my new notes to the old ones and try to create some coherence out of these hundreds of pieces of paper. This involves dividing the topic into a great many subheadings, writing each subheading at the top of a page of A4, stapling the relevant slips onto the appropriate page, and arranging the sheets in a consecutive order. Only then do I start writing. Compared with the labour of making, sorting and arranging notes, this is a relatively speedy business. But it is followed by a much more time-consuming task, that of travelling round the libraries to check the references in my footnotes, only too many of which, thanks to poor handwriting, carelessness and an innate tendency to 'improve' what I have read, turn out to be either slightly wrong or taken out of context. I wish I possessed the splendid insouciance of David Hume, about whom a Scottish friend said, 'Why, mon, David read a vast deal before he set about a piece of his book; but his usual seat was the sofa, and he often wrote with his legs up; and it would have been unco' fashious to have moved across the room when any little doubt occurred.'

When all my mistranscriptions have been sorted out, the task is finished. Months later, the proofs arrive, by which time more books and articles have been published and I have found several more delicious passages which cry out to be inserted. By then, of course, it is too late.

Hat tip: Languagehat.

Richard Maitland (1496-1586), Advyce to Lesom Mirriness, lines 1-16:

Quhen I haive done consider
  This warldis vanitie,
Sa brukill and sa slidder,
  Sa full of miserie;
Then I remember me    5
  That heir thair is no rest;
Thairfoir appeirentlie,
  To be mirrie is best.

Let us be blyth and glaid,
  My friendis all I pray;    10
To be pensive and sad
  Na thing it help us may.
Thairfoir put quyt away
  All heviness of thocht;
Thocht we murne nicht and day    15
  It will availl us nocht.

lesom = lawful
1 quhen = when
2 warldis = world's
3 brukill = brittle, slidder = slippery
7, 13 thairfoir = therefore
14 thocht = thought
15 thocht (should be thoch?) = though, murne = mourn, nicht = night
16 nocht = nought

Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Scenes IX (London Recreations):

In fine weather the old gentleman is almost constantly in the garden; and when it is too wet to go into it, he will look out of the window at it, by the hour together. He has always something to do there, and you will see him digging, and sweeping, and cutting, and planting, with manifest delight. In spring-time, there is no end to the sowing of seeds, and sticking little bits of wood over them, with labels, which look like epitaphs to their memory; and in the evening, when the sun has gone down, the perseverance with which he lugs a great watering-pot about is perfectly astonishing. The only other recreation he has, is the newspaper, which he peruses every day, from beginning to end, generally reading the most interesting pieces of intelligence to his wife, during breakfast.

The old lady is very fond of flowers, as the hyacinth-glasses in the parlour-window, and geranium-pots in the little front court, testify. She takes great pride in the garden too: and when one of the four fruit-trees produces rather a larger gooseberry than usual, it is carefully preserved under a wine-glass on the sideboard, for the edification of visitors, who are duly informed that Mr. So-and-so planted the tree which produced it, with his own hands.

On a summer's evening, when the large watering-pot has been filled and emptied some fourteen times, and the old couple have quite exhausted themselves by trotting about, you will see them sitting happily together in the little summerhouse, enjoying the calm and peace of the twilight, and watching the shadows as they fall upon the garden, and gradually growing thicker and more sombre, obscure the tints of their gayest flowers—no bad emblem of the years that have silently rolled over their heads, deadening in their course the brightest hues of early hopes and feelings which have long since faded away. These are their only recreations, and they require no more. They have within themselves, the materials of comfort and content; and the only anxiety of each, is to die before the other.

This is no ideal sketch. There used to be many old people of this description; their numbers may have diminished, and may decrease still more.

My great-grandparents in their garden.

Edwin Way Teale, Journey into Summer (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1960), pp. 298-299:

Among the early collectors of these relics of the past, there appears the somewhat pathetic figure of the German schoolmaster Johannes Beringer, of Würzburg. An avid fossil hunter, he took his students on frequent field trips to a nearby outcropping of soft shale. One day, as a joke, his pupils carved the image of an animal on a bit of rock. Their credulous teacher pounced on it with such enthusiasm that the hoax continued. Each subsequent field trip yielded greater treasures — frogs, flowers, insects, animals, even astronomical objects. In 1726, Beringer published his Lithographia Würceburgensis, an elaborately illustrated volume describing all his finds. Shortly afterwards, he discovered rocks containing Hebrew letters and then one with his own name inscribed on it. This was more than even his credulity could stand. Too late he realized he had been duped. In an effort to buy back every copy of his book, Beringer spent his life savings and died in poverty. Even so, his story has the ironic semblance of a happy ending. After his death, his family recouped their fortunes by selling the copies of the book as a rare curiosity.

Jorge Luis Borges, To the German Language (tr. Alastair Reid):

My destiny is in the Spanish language,
the bronze words of Francisco de Quevedo,
but in the long, slow progress of the night,
different, more intimate musics move me.
Some have been handed down to me by blood—    5
voices of Shakespeare, language of the Scriptures—
others by chance, which has been generous;
but you, gentle language of Germany,
I chose you, and I sought you out alone.
By way of grammar books and patient study,    10
through the thick undergrowth of the declensions,
the dictionary, which never puts its thumb on
the precise nuance, I kept moving closer.
My nights were full of overtones of Virgil,
I once said; but I could as well have named    15
Hölderlin, Angelus Silesius.
Heine lent me his lofty nightingales;
Goethe, the good fortune of late love,
at the same time both greedy and indulgent;
Keller, the rose which one hand leaves behind    20
in the closed fist of a dead man who adored it,
who will never know if it is white or red.
German language, you are your masterpiece:
love interwound in all your compound voices
and open vowels, sounds which accommodate    25
the studious hexameters of Greek
and undercurrents of jungles and of nights.
Once, I had you. Now, at the far extreme
of weary years, I feel you have become
as out of reach as algebra and the moon.    30

In lines 20-22 Borges refers to a poem by Gottfried Keller (1819-1890), here translated by James Joyce:

Now have I fed and eaten up the rose
Which then she laid within my stiffcold hand.
That I should ever feed upon a rose
I never had believed in liveman's land.

Only I wonder was it white or red
The flower that in the dark my food has been.
Give us, and if Thou give, thy daily bread,
Deliver us from evil, Lord, Amen.

Da hab' ich gar die Rose aufgegessen,
Die sie mir in die starre Hand gegeben!
Daß ich noch einmal würde Rosen essen,
Hätt nimmer ich geglaubt in meinem Leben!

Ich möcht' nur wissen, ob es eine rote,
Ob eine weiße Rose das gewesen?
Gib täglich uns, o Herr! von deinem Brote,
Und wenn du willst, erlös' uns von dem Bösen!

Martial 8.69:

Miraris veteres, Vacerra, solos
nec laudas nisi mortuos poetas.
Ignoscas petimus, Vacerra: tanti
non est, ut placeam tibi, perire.

Tr. Walter C.A. Ker:

You admire, Vacerra, the ancients alone, and praise none but dead poets. Your pardon, pray, Vacerra. It is not worth my while, merely to please you, to die.

Tr. William Hay:

The ancients all your veneration have:
You like no poet on this side the grave.
Yet, pray excuse me; if to please you, I
Can hardly think it worth my while to die.

Tr. Goldwin Smith:

Vacerra lauds no living poet's lays,
But for departed genius keeps his praise.
I, alas, live, nor deem it worth my while
To die, that I may win Vacerra's smile.

Tr. J. Wight Duff:

You like no bards, Vacerra, but the old:
Only dead poets you think poets true!
Pardon, Vacerra—may I make so bold?—
It's not worth dying to be liked by you.

Tr. William Matthews:

There are poets you praise,
But I notice they're all dead.
I'd rather find another way
to please you, friend, instead.

Tr. James Michie:

Rigidly classical, you save
Your praise for poets in the grave.
Forgive me, it's not worth my while
Dying to earn your critical smile.

Lessing imitated Martial in this little epigram:

Du lobest Todte nur? Vax, deines Lobes wegen
Hab' ich blutwenig Lust, mich bald in's Grab zu legen.

That is,

You praise only the dead? Vax, even to win your praise,
I have very little desire to lie down in my grave anytime soon.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. havoc:

[a. AFr. havok, altered in some way from OF. havot (c1150 in Du Cange, havo), used in same sense, esp. in phrase crier havot. Prob. of Teutonic origin.]

Du Cange, Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae Latinitatis, s.v. havo:

Odo de Diogilo lib. 4. de Ludovici VII. profect. in Orient. pag. 42: Veniunt de exercitu, qui cambiunt necessaria, junguntur et illis, qui ambiunt non sua. Igitur una die Flandrensis quidam dignus flagris et flamma, cernens immensas divitias, et immoderata cupiditate caecatus, clamat, Havo, Havo, rapiens, quod cupivit, etc. Flandris, Have, sunt divitiae, opes, pecuniae, etc. ex Lat. Habere. Sic clamabat ille: Quot bona, quot bona! ut alios ad praedam invitaret.

Du Cange is citing Odo of Deuil, De Ludovici VII profectione in Orientem, i.e. The Journey of Louis VII to the East, tr. Virginia Gingerick Berry:

From the army came people who were bartering for necessities, and they were joined by men who coveted the supplies of others. One day, therefore, a certain Fleming, fit to be scourged and burned in Hell, seeing the great wealth and blinded by immoderate greed, cried, "Havo! Havo!" seizing what he wished.

Anatoly Liberman, A Bibliography of English Etymology: Sources and Word List (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 621, s.v. havoc, cites:

Anonymous. 1889ii; Bernard, Thomas L. 1976; Grondhound, C. 1884: 354-5; J.C. 1877; Susenmihl, Ernst. 1855:329.

The names Grondhound and Susenmihl are incorrect. The first is a reference to C. Grondhoud, "Doublets in English, II" Taalstudie 5 (1884) 349-364 (at 354-355), and the second is a reference to Ernst Susemihl, "Zur Geschichte und Etymologie der englischen Sprache," Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 18 (1855) 321-43 (at 329). Grondhoud (with Trench and others before him) posited a connection between havoc and hawk, but I don't know if anyone today takes that theory seriously. See Walter W. Skeat, Notes on English Etymology, Chiefly Reprinted from the Transactions of the Philological Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), pp. 128-129, for more speculation on the etymology of havoc.

The OED defines havoc as:

1. In the phrase cry havoc, orig. to give to an army the order havoc!, as the signal for the seizure of spoil, and so of general spoliation or pillage. In later use (usually after Shakes.) fig., and associated with sense 2.

2. Devastation, destruction; esp. in phr. to make havoc, play havoc (freq. const. with), in which the earlier sense of spoliation or plunder has gradually passed into that of destructive devastation. Also in weakened sense: confusion and disorder, disarray. The phrases to work havoc, create havoc are also common.

One can also wreak (but please not reek or wreck) havoc. See OED, s.v. wreak, sense 8.b.: "To cause or effect (harm, damage, etc.), esp. in phr. to wreak havoc."

Excerpts from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Remorse: A Tragedy:

I.1.4-7 (Alvar):

If aught on earth demand an unmix'd feeling,
'Tis surely this—after long years of exile,
To step forth on firm land, and gazing round us,
To hail at once our country, and our birth-place.

I.1.20-24 (Zulimez):

Remorse is as the heart in which it grows:
If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews
Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy,
It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the inmost
Weeps only tears of poison!

I.1.108-109 (Alvar):

And what the mind believes impossible,
The bodily sense is slow to recognize.

I.2.322 (Alhadra):

There is no room in this heart for puling love-tales.

II.2.34-36 (Valdez):

My child, we must not give religious faith
To every voice which makes the heart a listener
To its own wish.

V.1.157-165 (Alvar):

Thou blind self-worshipper! thy pride, thy cunning,
Thy faith in universal villainy,
Thy shallow sophisms, thy pretended scorn
For all thy human brethren—out upon them!
What have they done for thee? have they given thee peace?
Cured thee of starting in thy sleep? or made
The darkness pleasant when thou wak'st at midnight?
Art happy when alone? Can'st walk by thyself
With even step and quiet cheerfulness?

William Wordsworth, The Excursion 7.590-631:

I feel at times a motion of despite    590
Towards one, whose bold contrivances and skill,
As you have seen, bear such conspicuous part
In works of havoc; taking from these vales,
One after one, their proudest ornaments.
Full oft his doings leave me to deplore    595
Tall ash-tree, sown by winds, by vapours nursed,
In the dry crannies of the pendent rocks;
Light birch, aloft upon the horizon's edge,
A veil of glory for the ascending moon;
And oak whose roots by noontide dew were damped,    600
And on whose forehead inaccessible
The raven lodged in safety.—Many a ship
Launched into Morecambe-bay, to him hath owed
Her strong knee-timbers, and the mast that bears
The loftiest of her pendants; He, from park    605
Or forest, fetched the enormous axle-tree
That whirls (how slow itself!) ten thousand spindles:
And the vast engine labouring in the mine,
Content with meaner prowess, must have lacked
The trunk and body of its marvellous strength,    610
If his undaunted enterprise had failed
Among the mountain coves. Yon household fir,
A guardian planted to fence off the blast,
But towering high the roof above, as if
Its humble destination were forgot—    615
That sycamore, which annually holds
Within its shade, as in a stately tent
On all sides open to the fanning breeze,
A grave assemblage, seated while they shear
The fleece-encumbered flock—the JOYFUL ELM,    620
Around whose trunk the maidens dance in May—
And the LORD'S OAK — would plead their several rights
In vain, if he were master of their fate;
His sentence to the axe would doom them all.
But, green in age and lusty as he is,    625
And promising to keep his hold on earth
Less, as might seem, in rivalship with men
Than with the forest's more enduring growth,
His own appointed hour will come at last;
And, like the haughty Spoilers of the world,    630
This keen Destroyer, in his turn, must fall.

The oak "on whose forehead inaccessible / the raven lodged in safety" (601-602) brings to mind Gilbert White's raven tree. Cf. also Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Raven: A Christmas Tale, Told by a Schoolboy to his Little Brothers and Sisters:

Underneath a huge oak tree
There was, of swine, a huge company,
That grunted as they crunched the mast:
For that was ripe, and fell full fast.
Then they trotted away, for the wind grew high:    5
One acorn they left, and no more might you spy.
Next came a Raven, that liked not such folly:
He belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy!

Blacker was he than blackest jet,
Flew low in the rain, and his feathers not wet.    10
He picked up the acorn and buried it straight
By the side of a river both deep and great.

        Where then did the Raven go?
        He went high and low,
Over hill, over dale, did the black Raven go.    15
        Many autumns, many springs
        Travelled he with wandering wings:
        Many summers, many winters—
        I can't tell half his adventures.

At length he came back, and with him a She,    20
And the acorn was grown to a tall oak tree.
They built them a nest in the topmost bough,
And young ones they had, and were happy enow.
But soon came a woodman in leathern guise,
His brow, like a pent-house, hung over his eyes.    25
He'd an axe in his hand, not a word he spoke,
But with many a hem! and a sturdy stroke,
At length he brought down the poor Raven's own oak.
His young ones were killed; for they could not depart,
And their mother did die of a broken heart.    30

The boughs from the trunk the woodman did sever;
And they floated it down on the course of the river
They sawed it in planks, and its bark they did strip,
And with this tree and others they made a good ship.
The ship, it was launched; but in sight of the land    35
Such a storm there did rise as no ship could withstand.
It bulged on a rock, and the waves rushed in fast:
The old Raven flew round and round, and cawed to the blast.
He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls—
See! see! o'er the topmast the mad water rolls!    40
    Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet,
And Death riding home on a cloud he did meet,
And he thank'd him again and again for this treat:
    They had taken his all, and Revenge was sweet!

Coleridge first published the poem anonymously in the Morning Post (March 10, 1798), with a mock attribution to Edmund Spenser. It circulated earlier in manuscript, as Charles Lamb quotes from it in a letter to Coleridge (February 5, 1797).

Labels: arboricide

Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 477 with note on p. 691:

Another spiritual descendant of Niebuhr, but as patriotic a Frenchman as Mommsen was a German, was Numa-Denys Fustel de Coulanges (1830-89). Just as Ranke made his reputation by going behind the historians to the archives and reading the actual reports of the Venetian ambassadors, so Fustel de Coulanges demanded evidence, in the shape of a Greek or Roman document, for any assertion about ancient history. His favorite question was 'Avez-vous un texte?' and he boasted of being the only man who had read every Latin text from the sixth century B.C. to the tenth century of the Christian era.<sup>15

15</sup> Fustel's fault as a historian, which is apparent as early as La Cité antique, was that although he insisted that every assertion must be supported by a document, he did not criticize the documents themselves so far as to recognize that even a contemporary narrative may be vitiated by mistakes, or lies, or interpolations. There is a good description of his work by C. Seignobos in Petit de Julleville's Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, 8. 279-96.

But "Avez-vous un texte?" for the assertion that Fustel said "Avez-vous un texte?"?

Seignobos (op. cit., published in 1899) doesn't quote these words. The closest he comes is on p. 284:

Très défiant à l'égard des systèmes qui dans notre siècle ont encombré l'histoire au point de cacher la vue du passé, il rejetait systématiquement toute étude de seconde main et s'astreignait à chercher toujours les faits dans l'analyse des documents. «L'historien, dit-il, doit se borner aux textes attentivement observés.» — «Lire les textes» ou «Cela n'est pas dans les textes», ces formules revenaient comme un refrain dans ses ouvrages et dans son enseignement.

The earliest attribution of "Avez-vous un texte?" to Fustel in Ogle Books (what a friend calls Google Books when it offers only a "snippet view") dates from 1915, viz., Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), La science allemande (Paris: A. Hermann, 1915), p. 90. This is more than 25 years after Fustel's death, but must be given great weight, as Duhem was a student at the École normale when Fustel was director.

I also find a first-hand quotation of something very much like "Avez-vous un texte?" in Salomon Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908), p. 196:

Ayant eu l'occasion, à plusieurs reprises, d'exprimer à M. d'Arbois de Jubainville la pensée que le druidisme avait été hostile aux images, j'ai toujours reçu du maître des études celtiques en France cette réponse un peu décourageante: «Avez-vous un texte qui le prouve»?

Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville lived from 1827 to 1910. He criticized Fustel harshly in Deux manières d'écrire l'histoire (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1896).

The scholar's insistence on a text is a trait that lends itself to mockery, e.g.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (June 1855): "A scholar is a man with this inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know."
  
• Montaigne, Essais 1.25 (tr. E.J. Trechmann): "I know one who, when I question him on what he knows, asks me for a book to show it me, and will not venture to tell me he has an itchy backside without straightway consulting his lexicon to find the meaning of 'itchy' and of 'backside'."

Hat tip: Brandon Watson at Siris, to whom I offer congratulations on six years of blogging.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Diary (January 12, 1850):

How little the all-important art of making meaning pellucid is studied now! Hardly any popular writer, except myself, thinks of it. Many seem to aim at being obscure. Indeed, they may be right enough in one sense; for many readers give credit for profundity to whatever is obscure, and call all that is perspicuous shallow. But coraggio! and think of A.D. 2850. Where will your Emersons be then? But Herodotus will still be read with delight. We must do our best to be read too.

James Boswell, Journal (March 14, 1765):

WILKES. 'Never a moment in my life low-spirited.' BOSWELL. 'What shall I do to get life over?' WILKES. 'While there's all ancient and modern learning and all arts and sciences, enough for life if three thousand years.' BOSWELL. 'Fate and free will?' WILKES. 'Let 'em alone.'

Id. (March 15, 1765):

WILKES. 'I'm always happy. I thank God for good health, good spirits and the love of books....Thank heaven for having given me the love of women. To many she gives not the noble passion of lust.'

Charles Spencelayh, Morning Chapter

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal C.218 (November 7?, 1837):

"Miracles have ceased." Have they indeed? When? They had not ceased this afternoon when I walked into the wood and got into bright, miraculous sunshine, in shelter from the roaring wind. Who sees a pine-cone, or the turpentine exuding from the tree, or a leaf, the unit of vegetation, fall from its bough, as if it said, "the year is finished," or hears in the quiet, piny glen the chickadee chirping his cheerful note, or walks along the lofty promontory-like ridges which, like natural causeways, traverse the morass, or gazes upward at the rushing clouds, or downward at a moss or a stone and says to himself, "Miracles have ceased"?

George Meredith, The Wild Rose:

High climbs June's wild rose,
Her bush all blooms in a swarm;
And swift from the bud she blows,
In a day when the wooer is warm;
Frank to receive and give,
Her bosom is open to bee and sun:
Pride she has none,
Nor shame she knows;
Happy to live.

Unlike those of the garden nigh,
Her queenly sisters enthroned by art;
Loosening petals one by one
To the fiery Passion's dart
Superbly shy.
For them in some glory of hair,
Or nest of the heaving mounds to lie,
Or path of the bride bestrew.
Ever are they the theme for song.
But nought of that is her share.
Hardly from wayfarers tramping along,
A glance they care not to renew.

And she at a word of the claims of kin
Shrinks to the level of roads and meads:
She is only a plain princess of the weeds,
As an outcast witless of sin:
Much disregarded, save by the few
Who love her, that has not a spot of deceit,
No promise of sweet beyond sweet,
Often descending to sour.
On any fair breast she would die in an hour.
Praises she scarce could bear,
Were any wild poet to praise.
Her aim is to rise into light and air.
One of the darlings of Earth, no more,
And little it seems in the dusty ways,
Unless to the grasses nodding beneath;
The bird clapping wings to soar,
The clouds of an evetide's wreath.

I don't know if this is the same as John Clare's wild rose in his sonnet The Hedge Rose:

The wild rose swells its prickly buds anew
& soon shall wear the summers witching hue
Those hues which nature as its dowery heirs
& beauty like a blossom wins & wears
On her soft cheeks when shepherds in the grove
Reach down the blushing flowers & talk of love
The very bees that such intrusions scare
Frit from the blossom that he culls her there
Flye round mistaken as they leave the bower
& take the maids sweet blushes for a flower
Thus wild dog roseys hung in every hedge
Wakens at joys hearts core its sweetest pledge
Shedding to summer lanes their rich perfume
& whispering memorys raptures while they bloom

Excerpts from John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter II (February 1, 1871):

"Employers." It is a noble title. If, indeed, they have found you idle, and given you employment, wisely,— let us no more call them mere "Men" of Business, but rather "Angels" of Business: quite the best sort of Guardian Angel.

Yet are you sure it is necessary, absolutely, to look to superior natures for employment? Is it inconceivable that you should employ—yourselves?

....

The labour producing no useful result was demoralizing. All such labour is.

The labour producing useful result was educational in its influence on the temper. All such labour is.

G.K. Chesterton, A Certain Nation, last stanza:

Thou hast a right to rule thyself; to be
The thing thou wilt; to grin, to fawn, to creep:
To crown these clumsy liars; ay, and we
Who knew thee once, we have a right to weep.

Chesterton meant France in 1899; some other possibilities come to mind in 2010.

Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, Letter II:

In the centre of this grove there stood an oak, which, though shapely and tall on the whole, bulged out into a large excrescence about the middle of the stem. On this a pair of ravens had fixed their residence for such a series of years, that the oak was distinguished by the title of The Raven Tree. Many were the attempts of the neighbouring youths to get at this eyry: the difficulty whetted their inclinations, and each was ambitious of surmounting the arduous task. But when they arrived at the swelling, it jutted out so in their way, and was so far beyond their grasp, that the most daring lads were awed, and acknowledged the undertaking to be too hazardous. So the ravens built on, nest upon nest, in perfect security, till the fatal day arrived in which the wood was to be levelled. It was in the month of February, when those birds usually sit. The saw was applied to the butt, the wedges were inserted into the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy blows of the beetle, or mallet, the tree nodded to its fall; but still the dam sat on. At last, when it gave way, the bird was flung from her nest; and, though her parental affection deserved a better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which brought her dead to the ground.

Id., Letter XXVIII (January 8, 1776):

At the south corner of the Plestor, or area near the church, there stood, about twenty years ago, a very old grotesque hollow pollard-ash, which, for ages, had been looked on with no small veneration as a shrew-ash. Now a shrew-ash is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the pains which a beast suffers from the running of a shrew-mouse over the part affected: for it is supposed that a shrew-mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a nature, that wherever it creeps over a beast, be it horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel anguish, and threatened with the loss of the use of the limb. Against this accident, to which they were continually liable, our provident forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, when once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrew-ash was made thus:—Into the body of the tree a deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrew-mouse was thrust in alive, and plugged in, no doubt with several quaint incantations long since forgotten. As the ceremonies necessary for such a consecration are no longer understood, all succession is at an end, and no such tree is known to subsist in the manor or hundred.

As to that on the Plestor,

"The late vicar stubb'd and burn'd it,"

when he was way-warden, regardless of the remonstrances of the bystanders, who interceded in vain for its preservation, urging its power and efficacy, and alleging that it had been

"Religione patrum multos servata per annos."

"The late vicar stubb'd and burn'd it"—a misquotation, obviously from memory, of Jonathan Swift, Baucis and Philemon, line 178: "So, the next parson stubbed and burnt it."

"Religione patrum multos servata per annos"—a quotation of Vergil, Aeneid 2.715 (in H. Rushton Fairclough's translation, "saved for many years by the reverence of our fathers").

Labels: arboricide

Excerpts from John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter I (January 1, 1871):

I have listened to many ingenious persons, who say we are better off now than ever we were before. I do not know how well off we were before; but I know positively that many very deserving persons of my acquaintance have great difficulty in living under these improved circumstances: also, that my desk is full of begging letters, eloquently written either by distressed or dishonest people; and that we cannot be called, as a nation, well off, while so many of us are living either in honest or in villainous beggary.

....

As you would find it thus impossible to class me justly in either party, so you would find it impossible to class any person whatever, who had clear and developed political opinions, and who could define them accurately. Men only associate in parties by sacrificing their opinions, or by having none worth sacrificing; and the effect of party government is always to develop hostilities and hypocrisies, and to extinguish ideas.

....

The first object of all work — not the principal one, but the first and necessary one — is to get food, clothes, lodging, and fuel.

It is quite possible to have too much of all these things. I know a great many gentlemen, who eat too large dinners; a great many ladies, who have too many clothes. I know there is lodging to spare in London, for I have several houses there myself, which I can't let. And I know there is fuel to spare everywhere, since we get up steam to pound the roads with, while our men stand idle; or drink till they can't stand, idle, or any otherwise.

Notwithstanding, there is agonizing distress even in this highly-favoured England, in some classes, for want of food, clothes, lodging, and fuel.

Robert Louis Stevenson, A College Magazine, I:

All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory.

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word: things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann....But enough has been said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper.

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way.

Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 114 with note on p. 127:

When asked why he had decided to enlist in the Artists' Rifles in 1915, Edward Thomas stopped, picked up a pinch of earth, and said, 'Literally, for this.'<sup>58

58</sup> Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (Oxford, 1958; repr. 1979), p. 154.

Farjeon's book is unavailable to me, but see the last stanza of Edward Thomas' poem Digging:

It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth.
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.

---

On this Memorial Day, I remember my mother's brother, my Uncle Phil (born June 22, 1925, died August 28, 2007). In World War II he fought as part of 3rd Platoon "E" Co. 2nd Battalion, 511th Parachute Inf., 11th Airborne Division. Five years ago he sent me this first-person account of a near brush with death on the island of Luzon in the Philippines (February, 1945):

When I was in New Guinea, before going to the Philippines, I ran into a paratrooper who had been wounded in combat. He gave me a few tips, which included taking part of a mess kit with me. He said that sometimes a unit is taken out of combat for a few days, it stays on rations. If there is a rear echelon unit with a kitchen close by, they will feed you if you have something to put the food in. So, when we were on Leyte preparing for the jump on Tagatay Ridge, on Luzon, I put the top of my mess kit and a spoon in my pack. After the close house-to-house fighting in and around Manila, the rolling open terrain approaching Ft. McKinley was a welcome change. Generally, the Japs were 200-300 yards away.

On this February day we were moving out to attack towards Ft. McKinley in fairly open terrain. There was not much cover. As a machine gunner, I always carried a carbine, a tripod or machine gun, and sometimes a box of ammunition. I never carried rations, as they would get in the way during a firefight. It was obvious that we did not anticipate any action this early in our advance. That day I had all of the above, along with a box of 5-in-1 rations. Right behind me was my ammo bearer named Lingerfelt. As we moved into an area with some bushes and trees, there was some enemy fire, but we kept on moving. We hit the ground, then ran a ways, then hit the ground again. We lost sight of the two scouts, Squad Leader, and a couple others who had been ahead of us. So we kept moving forward, trying to catch up. As we hurried across an open area, I was hit in the back with what was probably a .30 caliber bullet. It sent me sprawling onto the ground. It felt like someone had hit me with a 2x4. At the same time, Lingerfelt, just a couple yards behind me, was hit by a bullet that creased his ear and went around just inside his helmet, cutting up his helmet liner. At almost the same time, the ammo box that he had been carrying and set down by his head was hit and a couple rounds were exploded.

I thought that I had actually been wounded and maybe could not feel anything because of shock. Lingerfelt said he could see where the bullet went into my pack and where it came out. Lingerfelt was O.K. except for a sore ear. None of our troops were anywhere in sight. Still thinking that our guys were ahead of us, we decided to press on. I had a carbine on one shoulder, a tripod on the other, a box of ammo in one hand, and a box of 5-in-1 rations in the other. I could not run well enough without leaving something behind. I had to have the carbine, tripod, and ammo. The rations were left behind.

What we did not realize was that our company had doubled back to our own lines. Lingerfelt and I would run a few yards then dive onto the ground. All the while we were receiving enemy fire. I do not understand why they did not hit us again. After about 100 more yards, we came to a dirt road crossing the area. We were being fired on from the left so we turned right at the road. During this time we did not see any Japs or Americans.

There were shallow ditches on each side of the road. We would run a few yards then lay down in a ditch. When we were on one side, we received fire from that side; when we used the other ditch, we received fire from that side of the road. It turned out that we were taking fire from Americans on one side. We thought that Japs were on both sides firing at us.

Meanwhile, back in where our platoon was re-assembling, they realized we were missing. A radioman in our company, (E), overheard a message on his radio requesting that a tank go knock out a two-man "Jap Patrol". He realized that the "Jap Patrol" was us. He was able to contact personnel in the tank organization just in time to stop them from using their .50 cal machine gun. Guys from the tank outfit then came towards us yelling for us to come in. Until then we did not know that the firing from that side was "friendly fire".

When we finally made our way back to "E" Company I opened my pack (Musette Bag). The bullet had entered my pack and hit my mess kit top at about a 45-degree angle. It made a deep groove in the bottom, pushing out the metal for several inches to the end of the mess kit, where it came out through the end, leaving a jagged hole. The bullet also went through an oil bottle, a fairly fresh egg well-packaged in a grenade case, and after leaving the mess kit, it went along the folded olive drab towel which had been positioned between the mess kit and the back of my pack. When the towel was un-folded, it was shredded, and useless.

We ate light that evening due to the 5-in-1 box of rations left behind.

Andrew Wyeth, The Patriot
Related post: Pietas Erga Patrem.