From active life as a manufacturer he had retired to a good-sized white house close by the sidewalk as it passed over a knoll shaded by a magnificent and enormous elm tree. When the town fathers widened the street, cut some of the large roots of this tree, and thus led to its death, grandfather's regret was something from which I think he never quite recovered. It seemed almost as if the tree had been the residence of what the anthropologists call his "external soul."
"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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Wednesday, September 25, 2024
External Soul
Arthur Stanley Pease (1881-1964), Sequestered Vales of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), p. 5: