In play, love, music, books, I joy,
In town and country; and, indeed, there 's nought,
E'en to the luxury of sober thought, —
The sombre, melancholy mood, —
But brings to me the sovereign good.
J'aime le jeu, l'amour, les livres, la musique,
La ville et la campagne, enfin tout ; il n'est rien
Qui ne me soit souverain bien,
Jusqu'au sombre plaisir d'un coeur mélancolique.
"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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Sunday, April 12, 2026
Pleasures
Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695),
Les Amours de Psyché, Book II (tr. Eliza Wright):