(To F.G.)
With slower pen men used to write,
Of old, when "letters" were "polite;"
In ANNA'S, or in GEORGE'S days,
They could afford to turn a phrase
Or trim a straggling theme aright.
They knew not steam; electric light
Not yet had dazed their calmer sight;—
They meted out both blame and praise
With slower pen.
Too swiftly now the Hours take flight!
What's read at morn is dead at night:
Scant space have we for Art's delays,
Whose breathless thought so briefly stays,
We may not work—ah! would we might!—
With slower pen.
"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, August 08, 2013
On the Hurry of This Time
Austin Dobson (1840-1921), "On the Hurry of This Time," in his Collected Poems, 5th ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd, 1902), p. 472: