A long while, indeed, since my last date. But the weather has been generally sunny and pleasant, though often very cold; and I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the daylight hours in the open air. My chief amusement has been boating up and down the river.Today is a sunny and pleasant autumn day, and I've been chained to a desk since early this morning. Most of the day has thus been wasted, but a few hours of autumnal sunshine remain. I have no boat, but I can walk to the Mississippi River in half an hour, and so off I go.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, October 04, 2007
Autumnal Sunshine
Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Notebooks (October 10, 1842):