Are you studying French or Spanish now-a-days? If not, you should lose no time in commencing: for I have become so very devoted to the study of languages,—that I think a person is inexcusable who is deterred by those difficulties, which always impede the first steps we take in any science. Do not let my admonitions be vain:—for I assure you—that by every language you learn, a new world is opened before you. It is like being born again:—and new ideas break upon the mind with all the freshness and delight—with which we may suppose the first dawn of intellect to be accompanied.
"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, March 15, 2014
Born Again
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), letter to his sisters (September 1, 1828), in The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hillen, Vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 278-280 (at 280):