We mortals are most wonderfully tried,
Nor could we bear it, were we not vouchsafed
By Nature a divine frivolity.
Wir Menschen werden wunderbar geprüft,
Wir könnten's es nicht ertragen, hätt' uns nicht
Den holden Leichtsinn die Natur verliehn.
"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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Saturday, February 25, 2012
Frivolity
Goethe, Torquato Tasso, II.4 (lines 830-832), tr. Maurice Baring in Have You Anything to Declare? A Note Book with Commentaries (London: William Heinemann Ltd., n.d), p. 180: