Excuses for Not Writing

William Cowper, To His Cousin Lady Hesketh, Reasons Why He Could Not Write Her a Good Letter:

My pens are all split, and my ink-glass is dry;
Neither wit, common sense, nor ideas have I.

William Cowper, To Rev. Walter Bagot, Excuse for Delay in Writing to Him:

It is a maxim of much weight,
  Worth conning o'er and o'er,
He who has Homer to translate,
  Had need do nothing more.

My excuse is that I'm going out of town for a few days and probably won't have access to a computer.

In the meantime, try reading some of the blogs on the sidebar. Samples:

• Roger Kuin at Old Men ought to be Explorers has started a series on Forgotten Poems, with poems by Alfred Noyes and Francis Jammes. These forgotten poems deserve to be remembered, especially the one by Jammes.
  
• Dennis Mangan at Mangan's Miscellany writes entertainingly on plastic water bottles and aptronyms.
  
• The list of books I want to read grows longer each time I visit Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence. I had never heard of R.S. Thomas before, but what curmudgeon can resist this description (by Anthony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple)? "R.S. Thomas's hatred of modernity and all its works slides into bitter misanthropy and a severe limitation of human sympathy....Men did not live up to his standards. They ran after the transitory and failed to notice the eternal glory that surrounded them."