Laudator Temporis Acti

Asa Gray (1810-1888) seems to have been the first to use the word arboricide in English, but we should also give credit to Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), who in his Libri Plantarum 2.117-118 wrote:

Hanc hedera intexit ditem fallacibus ulnis,
  Blanditiisque malis Arboricida necat.

In Thomas Sprat's translation:

Her treacherously the Ivy does embrace,
And kills the Tree with Kindness in her Face.

Here is Cowley's own note, with my translation:

Arboricida. Verbum fictitium, sed satis ex analogia aliorum.

Arboricida. A made-up word, but sufficiently analogous to others.

See Otto Gradenwitz, Laterculi vocum Latinarum: voces Latinas et a fronte et a tergo ordinandas (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1904), pp. 282-283, for a list of Latin words ending in -cida, one of which is lignicida, and p. 330 for a list of words ending in -cidium.

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Agennius Urbicus, in Brian Campbell, The Writings of the Roman Land Surveyors: Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 2000), pp. 70 (Latin) and 71 (translation):

in Italia autem multi crescente religione sacratissima Christiana lucos profanos sive templorum loca occupaverunt et serunt.

Now, in Italy, as the most holy Christian religion increases, many people have taken over pagan groves or sites attached to temples, and now sow them.

On Agennius Urbicus see Schanz-Hosius, Geschichte der römischen Literatur, 4. Teil, 2. Band = Die Literatur des fünften und sechsten Jahrhunderts (München: C.H. Beck, 1920; rpt. 1971), § 1138, pp. 302-304.

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Gregory the Great (540-604), Dialogues 2.8, tr. by Hilary Costello and Eoin de Bhaldraithe in Gregory the Great, The Life of St. Benedict, tr. (Petersham: St. Bede's Publications, 1993; rpt. 2003), p. 64:

The stronghold called Casinum is situated on the side of a high mountain, where a broad shelf of land forms the site. Behind this the mountain rises steeply for a distance of three miles, as if to rear its summit to the skies. On the top there was a very old temple and there, according to ancient customs among the heathens, Apollo was worshipped by the poor foolish natives of the rustic population. Sacred groves dedicated to demons grew all around the temple where a horde of pagans still took great pains to offer their sacrilegious sacrifices.

As soon as he arrived, the man of God smashed up the idol, overturned the altar and felled the sacred trees. In the temple of Apollo itself he built an oratory to Blessed Martin, and on the site of the altar to Apollo he built an oratory to St. John.

The Latin:

Castrum namque quod Cassinum dicitur, in excelsi montis latere situm est, qui videlicet mons distenso sinu hoc idem castrum recepit, sed per tria millia in altum se subrigens, velut ad aera cacumen tendit: ubi vetustissimum fanum fuit, in quo ex antiquorum more gentilium a stulto rusticorum populo Apollo colebatur. Circumquaque etiam in cultu daemonum luci succreverant, in quibus adhuc eodem tempore infidelium insana multitudo sacrificiis sacrilegis insudabat.

Illuc itaque vir Dei perveniens, contrivit idolum, subvertit aram, succidit lucos, atque in ipso templo Apollinis oraculum beati Martini, ubi vero ara eiusdem Apollinis, fuit oraculum sancti Ioannis construxit.

succidit: succendit alii

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Sermon of St. Eligius (588-660), Bishop of Noyon-Tournai, quoted in Dado (aka Audoen or Ouen or Owen), Life of St. Eligius 2.16, tr. Jo Ann McNamara:

Venerate no creature beyond God and his saints. Shun springs and arbors which they call sacred. You are forbidden to make the crook which they place on the crossroads and wherever you find one you should burn it with fire. For you must believe that you can be saved by no other art than the invocation and cross of Christ. For how will it be if groves where these miserable men make their devotions, are felled and the wood from them given to the furnace? See how foolish man is, to offer honor to insensible, dead trees and despise the precepts of God almighty.

2.22:

Another day taking the road for necessary purposes, he came to a place not far from the royal estate at Compiègne. Weary from traveling, he turned into a certain colonus's field. There was an arbor of nut trees there, heavily laden with edible fruit. And when Eligius had rested a while, some of his servants went out and began to pick nuts from the trees for it was time for them to eat together. Rushing forward, the lord of the orchard loudly complained that his nuts were being stolen from him. Eligius called his men to him and softly and mildly soothed him saying: "Friend, don't be a nuisance to us because of this. If the boys took a little, there is much still remaining and I will give you money in satisfaction for anything that they have taken." But with swollen mind, spurning his mildness, he reviled him, taxing him closely with hard words. Thus Eligius with unruffled spirit, scolded his servants more harshly for what they had done and ordered them to give the man three gold pieces for the substance he had lost. Then, after the example of the Lord with the fig tree, he turned toward the orchard and ordered: "Since we were so attacked for you, nevermore till eternity shall you bear fruit." And, oh wonderful power of God, whose example was followed in this word, his virtue achieved the same effect. For after a little while the arbor dried up and remained permanently arid. So in this case he merited to follow the Lord's example, ordering the orchard with confidence, because he had put his whole faith in the Lord's words Who said, "He who believes in me, not only shall he do what I do but what is more it shall be done."

Original Latin in Vita Eligii episcopi Noviomagensis, ed. B. Krutsch, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorum Rerum Merovingicarum Tomus IV (Hanover: Hahn, 1902), pp.669-742 (2.16 at pp. 707-708):

Nulli creaturae praeter Deum et sanctis eius venerationem exhibeatis; fontes vel arbores quos sacrivos vocant succidite; pedum similitudines, quos per bivios ponunt, fieri vetate, et ubi inveneritis, igne cremate. Per nullam aliam artem salvari vos credatis nisi per invocationem et crucem Christi. Nam illud quale est, quod si arbores illae, ubi miseri homines vota reddunt, ceciderint, nec ex eis ligna ad focum sibi deferunt? Et videte, quanta stultitia est hominum, si arbori insensibili et mortuae honorem inpendunt et Dei omnipotentis praecepta contempnunt.

2.22 (pp. 713-714):

Una autem dierum iter necessarium carpens, devenit ad quendam locum haud longe a Conpendio regali, optimum praedium, et fatigatus ex itinere, divertit in agrum cuiusdam coloni; erat autem illi arbor magna nucarii onusta fructu vescibili. Cumque Eligius in diversorium quiesceret, egressi quidam ex ministris eius coeperunt ex praefata arbuscula avellere nuces; erat enim tempus, quo congrue vesci poterant. Accurrens autem concite dominus arbustae, causabatur procaciter nuces sibi subripere; quo Eligius conperto vocat ad se virum, et blande ac leniter eum demulcens, ait: 'Noli, amice, huiuscemodi ob causam molestus nobis existere, et si pauca pueri praesumpserunt, plurima tibi adhuc supersunt; nam et hoc quod attigerunt ego, data pecunia, tibi gratifice satisfaciam'. At ille tumida mente lenitatem eius spernens, duris eum amaricabat verbis, eadem crebrius taxans. Tunc Eligius animo inmutatus famulos quidem pro rei facto durius obiurgavit, homini vero pro substantiae damno tres aureos dari iussit; ad arbustam tamen conversus, nimirum salvatoris ficulneae imperantis exemplo usus, ait: 'Quoniam tantopere pro te lacescimur, numquam ex te ex hoc iam fructus nascatur in aeternum'. Et, o mira Domini potentia! cuius exemplum secutus fuerat in verbo, eiusdem et virtus subsequitur in effectu; nam post non longum spatium arefacta arbusta, sicca demum permanet in aevum. Merito igitur in hoc opere dominicum secutus exemplum, arbustae cum fiducia imperavit, qui fide plenissimat dominicam tenebat sententiam, qua dicitur, quia qui credit in me, non solum faciet ea quae ego facio, sed et maiora, inquit, faciet.

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Council of Nantes (7th or 9th century?), c. 18, in Jacques Sirmond, ed. Concilia Antiqua Galliae (Paris, 1629; rpt. Aalen: Scientia, 1970), vol. 3, p. 607 (my translation):

Bishops and their clergy ought to struggle with the greatest zeal to cut down and burn trees consecrated to demons, which the common people worship and hold in such veneration that they dare not cut branch or shoot from them.

Summo studio decertare debent episcopi et eorum ministri, ut arbores demonibus consecratae quas vulgus colit, et in tanta veneratione habet, ut nec ramum vel surculum inde audeat amputare, radicitus excidantur atque comburantur.

For bibliography on the disputed existence and date of the Council of Nantes, see Bernadette Filotas, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005 = Studies and Texts, 151), p. 367.

Labels: arboricide

Jasper Griffin, "Augustan Poetry and the Life of Luxury," in Latin Poets and Roman Life (London: Duckworth, 1985; rpt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 1-31 (at 17):

The private life of the Latin love poets will have borne little resemblance to that of a modern scholar.

William Butler Yeats, The Scholars:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

Martial 3.17 (tr. Tony Harrison):

The tart passed round for sweet's so hot
no one touches it. No one, but NOT
Sabidius whose greed burns more.
He blows on it 1-2-3-4.
It's cool. Still no one touches it —
Sabidius's breath turns all to shit.

Circumlata diu mensis scribilita secundis
  urebat nimio saeva calore manus;
sed magis ardebat Sabidi gula: protinus ergo
  sufflavit buccis terque quaterque suis.
illa quidem tepuit digitosque admittere visa est,
  sed nemo potuit tangere: merda fuit.

Martial 3.28 (tr. Paul Nixon):

"There's a horrible smell in poor Marius' ear."
  You're surprised at the matter?
A coincidence, Nestor, escapes you, I fear —
  That's just where you chatter.

Auriculam Mario graviter miraris olere.
  tu facis hoc: garris, Nestor, in auriculam.

Related post: Halitosis.

In Theodor Hirsch et al., edd., Scriptores Rerum Prussicarum: Die Gesichtsquellen der preussischen Vorzeit bis zum Untergange der Ordensherrschaft, 4. Bd. (Leipzig, 1870), p. 239 = Aeneas Sylvius (Pope Pius II), Historia de Europa (Basel, 1551), c. XXVI, f. 417, there is the following account of missionary work in Lithuania by Jerome of Prague, who lived from 1379 to 1416:

Then he came to other peoples who worshipped forests sacred to devils and who considered one particular forest to be more worthy of worship than others. For several days, revealing the sacraments of our faith, he preached to this folk, and at last he ordered them to cut down the forest. Although people were present with axes, there was no one who dared to touch the holy wood with iron. Therefore Jerome, taking the lead, grabbed a two-headed axe and felled a certain tall tree. Then the crowd followed in eager emulation; some were cutting down the forest with saws, some with picks, some with axes. They reached the middle of the grove, where they thought that a very old oak, holy above all the others, was in particular the dwelling place of gods. For some time no one dared strike; finally one man, bolder than the others, upbraiding his comrades for being afraid to strike the wood (an inanimate thing), raised his axe and was planning to chop the tree, when he struck his thigh and fell down in a faint.

The surrounding crowd was astonished — they wept, lamented, and accused Jerome of persuading them to violate the sacred home of the god. There was no longer anyone who dared to ply the axe. Thereupon Jerome, claiming that these were demonic illusions designed to bamboozle the eyes of the deceived crowd, ordered the man (whom I said fell down wounded) to get up, and he showed that the man wasn't harmed at all. Soon, with the aid of the crowd, he drove the axe against the tree, felled the huge mass with a loud crash, and cut down the entire grove.

In that region there were several other forests, considered holy by reason of the same superstition. While Jerome was hastening to them in order to cut them down, a large crowd of women approached Witold with weeping and wailing. They complained that their sacred grove had been cut down and the home of their god taken away, in which they had been accustomed to seek divine aid, and whence they had obtained rain and sun. They no longer knew where to seek the god, because Jerome and his followers had taken away the god's dwelling. There were other, smaller groves, in which gods were accustomed to be worshipped, but Jerome wanted to destroy these, too — he was introducing certain strange rites to uproot their ancestral customs. The women therefore asked and beseeched Witold not to allow the places of their ancestral rites and their ceremonies to be abolished. Men also followed the women and claimed they could not endure the new religion; they said they would rather leave their land and their ancestral hearths than abandon the religion they had received from their forefathers. Moved by this circumstance and fearing a popular uprising, Witold wished Christ, rather than himself, to be without followers. He recalled the letters in which he had told the chiefs of his provinces to obey Jerome, and ordered Jerome to depart from the territory.

The preceding rough translation is my own, because I couldn't find one by anyone else. Here is the Latin, divided into paragraphs by me:

Postremo alios populos adiit, qui sylvas daemonibus consecratas venerabantur et inter alias unam cultu digniorem putavere. Praedicavit huic genti pluribus diebus fidei nostrae aperiens sacramenta, denique ut sylvam succideret imperavit; ubi populus cum securibus affuit, nemo erat, qui sacrum lignum ferro contingere auderet. Prior itaque Hieronymus assumpta bipenni excellentem quandam arborem detruncavit. Tum secuta multitudo alacri certamine; alii serris alii dolabris alii securibus sylvam deiiciebant. Ventura erat ad medium nemoris, ubi quercum vetustissimam et ante omnes arbores religione sacram et quam potissime sedem [Deorum?] esse putabant. Percutere aliquamdiu nullus praesumpsit; postremo ut est alter altero audacior increpans quidam socios, qui lignum rem insensatam percutere formidarent, elevata bipenni magno ictu cum arborem caedere arbitraretur, tibiam suam percussit atque in terram semianimis cecidit.

Attonita circum turba flere, conqueri, Hieronymum accusare, qui sacram Dei domum violari suasisset, neque jam quisquam erat, qui ferrum exercere auderet. Tum Hieronymus illusiones daemonum esse affirmans, quae deceptae plebis oculos fascinarent, surgere quem cecidisse vulneratum diximus imperavit et nulla in parte laesum ostendit et mox ad arborem adacto ferro adiuvante multitudine ingens onus cum magno fragore prostravit totumque nemus succidit.

Erant in ea regione plures sylvae pari religione sacrae, ad quas dum Hieronymus amputandas pergit mulierum ingens numerus plorans atque eiulans Vitoldum adit, sacrum lucum succisum queritur et domum Dei ademptam, in qua divinam opem petere consuessent, inde pluvias inde soles obtinuisse; nescire iam quo in loco Deum quaerant, cui domicilium abstulerint; esse aliquos minores lucos, in queis Dii coli soleant, eos quoque delere Hieronymum velle, qui nova quaedam sacra introducens patrium morem extirpet; rogare igitur atque obtestari, ne maiorum religionum loca et caeremonias auferri sinat. Sequuntur et viri mulieres nec se ferre posse novum cuitum asserunt, relinquere potius terram et patrios lares quam religionem a maioribus acceptam dicunt. Motus ea re Vitoldus veritusque populorum tumultum Christo potius quam sibi deesse plebem voluit. Revocatisque literis, quas praesidibus provinciarum declarat jubens parere Hieronymo, hominem ex provincia decedere iussit.

Jerome of Prague's missionary work ultimately didn't redeem him in the eyes of church authorities. He was burned at the stake as a heretic.

Labels: arboricide

John Clare, note from Peterborough MS A57:

An almost boundless solitary heath with its stumpy bushes & a lonely hut built up of brush wood & thacked with fern would to my feelings be more delightful to meet with then a crowded City full of mighty streets triumphal arches & marble temples

John Clare, The Woods:

I love to roam the woods
Oft patted by the boughs
That meet from either side
& form an arch of leaves
Till hidden as it where from all the world
I stand & muse upon the pleasant scene

I seem to be myself
The only one that treads
The earth at such a time
So vacant is the mass
That spreads around me one hugh sea of leaves
& intertwining grains of thickest shades

No human eye is visible
No human sound attracts
The ear—but musing solitude
One unembodied thought
Thinks the heart into stillness as the world
Was left behind for somthing green & new

& lonely—& Ive thought
In such a spot to build
An hermitage or hut
With books & leisure left
How sweet t'would be but then again
I've turned to my old home & felt it vain

Yet sure a hut close thatched
Chafed by oerleaning boughs
In such a place when night
Dark on the crowd of trees
Found us locked in beside a blazing fire
Might give us happiness & pleasing fears

Fear books can give us
When we read strange tales
Of dwellers in the depths
Of earths untrodden shades
Where woods surround lone huts impassable
& nought lives near them but the hope of heaven

John George Brown, Camp in the Maine Wood, No.3 (1879)
Related posts:

• A Spot Fit for Hermits
  
• To Be Happy At Home

Henry David Thoreau, Journal (July 23, 1851):

The wind has fairly blown me outdoors; the elements were so lively and active, and I so sympathized with them, that I could not sit while the wind went by. And I am reminded that we should especially improve the summer to live out-of-doors. When we may so easily, it behooves us to break up this custom of sitting in the house, for it is but a custom, and I am not sure that it has the sanction of common sense. A man no sooner gets up than he sits down again. Fowls leave their perch in the morning, and beasts their lairs, unless they are such as go abroad only by night. The cockerel does not take up a new perch in the barn, and he is the embodiment of health and common sense. Is the literary man to live always or chiefly sitting in a chamber through which nature enters by a window only? What is the use of the summer?

George Inness, Summer Morning

William Allingham, By the Way: Verses, Fragments, and Notes, arranged by Helen Allingham (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), p. 75:

"Laudator temporis acti" is a very old jest or taunt; and no doubt the world looks brighter to most of us at twenty than at sixty; nevertheless a man must have leave to say, if he think so, that the world—even supposing general progress to be a necessary doctrine—is not at all points improving. Nay, does not history teach us that the praisers of the good old times must have been sometimes in the right of it, at least in the comparison of one generation with another?

Hat tip: Stephen Pentz.

Life of St. Amand, tr. by J.N. Hillgarth in The Conversion of Western Europe, 350-750 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), rpt. as Christianity and Paganism, 350-750: The Conversion of Western Europe (Philadelpha: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 139-148 (at 147-148):

[24] The faithful testimony of the venerable priest Erchangelisus should not be passed over. When the man of God Amand was preaching in the county of Beauvais he came to a place called Ressons on the River Aronde. There was a blind woman there, who had lost her sight a long time ago. Entering her house the man of God began to ask her how this blindness had come upon her. She replied that the only reason was that she had always venerated auguries and idols. She then indicated the place where she used to pray to her idol, a tree dedicated to the demon. The man of God said: "I am not amazed that you became blind for this folly but I wonder that the mercy of God has sustained you so long. For when you should adore your Creator and Redeemer, you adore demons and dumb idols, who cannot do you or themselves any service. Now take an axe and cut down this abominable tree by which you have lost your bodily sight and your soul's salvation. I trust that, if you firmly believe, you may receive the sight you once had from the Lord." With her daughter leading her by the hand the woman hastened to the tree and endeavored to cut it down. Then the man of God called her to him, made the Sign of the Cross on her eyes and, invoking Christ's Name, restored her to her former health, instructed her how she should act, and left her. Changing her life for the better, she spent the rest of her days chastely and soberly.

Latin text of Vita S. Amandi, ed. B. Krusch, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorum Rerum Merovingicarum Tomus V (Hannover: Hahn, 1910), pp. 428-449 (at 447):

[24] Nec illud quoque preatereundum putavi, quod, presbitero quodam nomen Erchengiliso venerabili atque fideli viro narrante, didici. Quadam die, dum vir Domini Amandus in pago Belloacinse verbum Domini praedicaret, pervenit ad quendam locum, cui vocabulum est Rosonto, secus Oronnam fluvium, eratque ibi mulier quaedam caeca, quae longo iam tempore, amisso lumine, nil praeter tenebras agnoverat. Ingressus autem vir Dei domum illius, coepit percunctari ab ea, qualiter ei haec caecitas evenisset. Respondente illa, quod non ob causam aliam ei ipsa caecitas evenerat, nisi quod auguria vel idola semper coluerat, insuper ostendente ei locum, in quo praedictum idolum orare consueverat, scilicet arborem, quae erat daemoni dedicata, vir Domini ait: 'Non miror, si pro hac stultitia caeca facta sis, sed admiror clementiam Domini, qui te tamdiu exspectando sustenat, ut, cum factorem et redemptorem tuum adorare debeas, adoras daemones et idola muta, quae nec tibi nec sibi possunt prodesse. Nunc igitur accipe securim et hanc nefandam arborem quantotius succidere festina, per quam et lumen amisisti corporis et animae perdidisti salutem; confido enim, si firmiter credideris, lumen pristinum a Domino consequi possis. Educente autem illa puellae suae manibus, ad arborem citius mulier perrexit atque eam excidere conabatur. Tum vir Domini Amandus eam ad se advocans, signum crucis super oculos eius inprimens, invocatoque Christi nomine, pristinae reddidit sanitati; instructamque, qualiter se agere deberet, relinquens, omnibus diebus vitae suae caste atque sobrie se exhibuit, et correctiorem vitam deinceps gerens, moresque commutavit in melius.

Saint Amand, patron saint of brewers, lived from approximately 584 to 675.

Labels: arboricide

Thoreau, Journal (October 23, 1855):

Now is the time for chestnuts. A stone cast against the trees shakes them down in showers upon one's head and shoulders. But I cannot excuse myself for using the stone. It is not innocent, it is not just, so to maltreat the tree that feeds us. I am not disturbed by considering that if I thus shorten its life I shall not enjoy its fruit so long, but am prompted to a more innocent course by motives purely of humanity. I sympathize with the tree, yet I heaved a big stone against the trunks like a robber,—not too good to commit murder. I trust that I shall never do it again. These gifts should be accepted, not merely with gentleness, but with a certain humble gratitude. The tree whose fruit we would obtain should not be too rudely shaken even. It is not a time of distress, when a little haste and violence even might be pardoned. It is worse than boorish, it is criminal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shadows us. Old trees are our parents, and our parents' parents, perchance. If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others. The thought that I was robbing myself by injuring the tree did not occur to me, but I was affected as if I had cast a rock at a sentient being,—with a duller sense than my own, it is true, but yet a distant relation. Behold a man cutting down a tree to come at the fruit! What is the moral of such an act?

Labels: arboricide

From John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, VI (June 1, 1871):

When I only opine things, I hold my tongue; and work till I more than opine—until I know them. If the things prove unknowable, I, with final perseverance, hold my tongue about them, and recommend a like practice to other people. If the things prove knowable, as soon as I know them, I am ready to write about them, if need be; not till then.

It's good advice, although I'm not sure the prolific Ruskin always strictly followed it.

Wikipedia, s.v. Coulrophobia:

Coulrophobia is abnormal or exaggerated fear of clowns....The prefix "coulro=" comes from the Ancient Greek κωλοβαθριστής (kōlobathristēs), "one who goes on stilts".

Questions arise:

1. Whence comes the r after the l?
   
2. Why is Greek omega transliterated as English ou?
   
3. Why is -phobia attached to only the beginning of the Greek word?

Coulrophobia started to pop up in English in the late 1990s. There is a spurious 1997 example in Google News Archives (actually from 2008). The earliest example in Google Books is Mary Ann D'Onofrio and Elizabeth D'Onofrio, Psychiatric Words and Phrases, 2nd ed. (Health Professions Institute, 1998), but this is a "no preview" book. The word has recently started to show up in French and German as coulrophobie.

No ancient Greek word starts with κουλρο- (koulro-), and no other English word starts with coulro-. It's a meaningless prefix, so far as I can tell, and the word coulrophobia should be avoided.

According to Liddell-Scott-Jones, κωλοβαθριστής is a rare word, occurring only in Hesychius. It and its rare cousin κωλόβαθρον (kōlóbathron = stilt) apparently come from κῶλον (kōlon = limb, member).

The standard ancient Greek word for clown is γελωτοποιός (gelōtopoiós, literally laughter-maker), e.g. Xenophon, Symposium 1.11, etc. See S.C. Woodhouse, English-Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1910), s.vv. buffoon, clown, and jester. Woodhouse s.v. buffoon also gives βωμόλοχος (bōmólochos) as a possibility.

If psychobabble needs a sesquipedalian word for abnormal or exaggerated fear of clowns, gelotopoiophobia or bomolochophobia would be better than coulrophobia.

Labels: lexicography

Porphyry, On Philosophy from Oracles, quoted by Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, tr. E.H. Gifford (4.23, on evil spirits):

[T]hey also force men to fall into inarticulate noises and flatulence by sharing the same enjoyment with them.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, Eng. tr. (Leiden: Brill, 1998), §§ 882-886 (pp. 393-394), discusses the rhetorical device known as praeteritio, defined as "the announcement of the intention to leave certain things out." The intention is ironic, because by alluding to and enumerating the things to be passed over, the speaker actually draws attention to them.

A classic example is Cicero, Against Catiline 1.14 (tr. C. Macdonald):

Or again, shortly after you had made room for a new bride by murdering your former wife, did you not compound this deed with yet another crime that defies belief? I do not dwell on this and readily allow it to be glossed over in silence lest it be thought that this state has allowed so heinous a crime to have been committed or to have gone unpunished. I pass over the total ruin to your fortune which you will feel hanging over you on the coming Ides.

Quid vero? nuper, cum morte superioris uxoris novis nuptiis locum vacuefecisses, nonne etiam alio incredibili scelere hoc scelus cumulavisti? quod ego praetermitto et facile patior sileri, ne in hac civitate tanti facinoris immanitas aut exstitisse aut non vindicata esse videatur. Praetermitto ruinas fortunarum tuarum quas omnes proximis Idibus tibi impendere senties.

There is also an amusing example in Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Our Parish IV (The Election for Beadle):

He would not allude to individuals (the ex-churchwarden continued, in the celebrated negative style adopted by great speakers). He would not advert to a gentleman who had once held a high rank in the service of his majesty; he would not say, that that gentleman was no gentleman; he would not assert, that that man was no man; he would not say, that he was a turbulent parishioner; he would not say, that he had grossly misbehaved himself, not only on this, but on all former occasions; he would not say, that he was one of those discontented and treasonable spirits, who carried confusion and disorder wherever they went; he would not say, that he harboured in his heart envy, and hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. No! He wished to have everything comfortable and pleasant, and therefore, he would say—nothing about him (cheers).

Thoreau, Journal (February 14, 1855):

I said to Therien, "You didn't live at Smith's last summer. Where did you live? At Baker's?" "Yes," said he. "Well, is that a good place?" "Oh, yes." "Is that a better place than Smith's?" "Oh, a change of pasture makes a fatter calf."

There is a French proverb to this effect—"Changement d'herbe réjouit les veaux." According to Littré, it "se dit pour exprimer que les changements plaisent d'ordinaire aux jeunes gens." Eugène Rolland, Faune Populaire de la France, Tome V (Les Mammifères Domestiques), Deuxième Partie (Noms Vulgaires, Dictons, Proverbes, Contes et Superstitions) (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1882), p. 49, gives the following English equivalent—"Change of pasture makes fat calves."

Alex Therien was French Canadian, and I wonder if he had this French proverb in mind when answering Thoreau's question.

On the relations between the two men, see Robert W. Bradford, "Thoreau and Therien," American Literature 34 (1962-1963) 499-506.

In the novel Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest by R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), Bull Garnet is the steward of Sir Cradock Nowell. Bull likes nothing more than tree-felling, but his young son Bob hates nothing more. Chapter XII shows the two in conflict:

Why Bull Garnet so enjoyed the cutting down of a tree, none but those who themselves enjoy it may pretend to say. Of course we will not refer it to the reason assigned in the well-known epigram, which contains such a wholesale condemnation of this arboricidal age. In another century, London builders will perhaps discover, when there are no trees left, that a bit of tuck-pointing by the gate, and a dab of mud-plaster beside it, do not content the heart of man like the leaves, and the drooping shadowy rustle, which is the type of himself.

Bull Garnet stood there in the October morning, with the gate wide open, flung back by his strong hand upon its hinges, as if it had no right to them. The round bolt dropped from the quivering force, dropped through the chase of the loop, and bedded deep in the soft, wet ground.

With much satisfaction the gate brought up, and felt itself anchored safely; Bull Garnet gave the bolt a kick, which hurled all the rusty screws out. Then he scarcely stopped to curse the blacksmith; he wanted the time for the woodcutters. At a glint from the side of his vast round eyes—eyes that took in everything, and made all the workmen swear and believe that he could see round a corner—he descried that the axemen were working the tree askew to the strain of the ropes. The result must be that the comely young oak, just proud of its first big crop of acorns, would swerve on the bias of the wind, stagger heavily, and fall headlong upon the smart new fence. There was no time for words—in a moment he had kicked the men right and left, torn off his coat, and caught up an axe, and dealt three thundering strokes in the laggard twist of the breach. Away went the young oak, swaying wildly, trying once to recover itself, then crashing and creaking through the brushwood, with a swish from its boughs and leaves, and a groan from its snaggy splinters. A branch took one of the men in his face, and laid him flat in a tussock of grass.

"Serve you right, you lubber; I'm devilish glad," cried Bull Garnet; " and I hope you won't move for a week."

The next moment, he went up and raised him, felt that his limbs were sound, and gave him a dram of brandy.

"All right, my fine fellow. Next time you'll know something of the way to fell a tree. Go home now, and I'll send you a bottle of wine."

....

The boy leaped the new X fence very cleverly, through the fork of the fingers, and stood before his father in a flame of indignation. Mr. Garnet, with that queer expression which the face of a middle-aged man wears when he recalls his boyhood, ere yet he begins to admire it, was looking at his own young life with a contemplative terror. He was saying to himself, "What cheek this boy has got!" and he was feeling all the while that he loved him the more for having it.

"Hurrah, Bob, my boy; you're come just in time." Mr. Garnet tried very hard to look as if he expected approval. Well enough all the time he knew that he had no chance of getting it. For Bob loved nature in any form, especially as expressed in the noble eloquence of a tree. And now he saw why he had been sent to the village on a trifling errand that morning.

"Just in time for what, sir?" Bob's indignation waxed yet more. That his father should dare to chaff him!

"Just in time to tell us all about these wonderful red-combed fungi. What do you call them—some long name, as wonderful as themselves?"

Bob kicked them aside contemptuously. He could have told a long story about them, and things which men of thrice his age, who have neglected their mother, would be glad to listen to. Nature, desiring not revenge, has it in the credulous itch of the sons who have turned their backs on her.

"Oh, father," said Bob, with the tears in his eyes; "father, you can't have known that three purple emperors came to this oak, and sat upon the top of it, every morning for nearly a week, in the middle of July. And it was the most handsomest fifty-year oak till you come right to Brockenhurst bridge."

"Most handsomest, Bob!" cried Mr. Garnet, glad to lay hold of any thing; "come along with me, my son; I must see to your education."

Near them stood a young spruce fir, not more than five feet high. It had thrown up a straight and tapering spire, scaled with tender green. Below were tassels, tufts, and pointlets, all in triple order, pluming over one another in a pile of beauty. The tips of all were touched with softer and more glaucous tone. But all this gentle tint and form was only as a framework now, a loom to bear the web of heaven. For there had been a white mist that morning—autumn's breath made visible; and the tree with its net of spider's webs had caught the lucid moisture. Now, as the early sunlight opened through the layered vapours, that little spruce came boldly forth a dark bay of the forest, and met all the spears of the orient. Looped and traced with threads of gauze, the lacework of a fairy's thought, scarcely daring to breathe upon its veil of tremulous chastity, it kept the wings of light on the hover, afraid to weigh down the whiteness. A maiden with the love-dream nestling under the bridal faldetta, a child of genius breathing softly at his own fair visions, even an infant's angel whispering to the weeping mother—what image of humanity can be so bright and exquisite as a common tree's apparel ?

"Father, can you make that?" Mr. Garnet checked his rapid stride; and for once he admired a tree.

"No, my son; only God can do such glorious work as that."

"But it don't take God to undo it. Smash!"

Bob dashed his fists through the whole of it, and all the draped embroidery, all the pearly filagree, all the festoons of silver, were but as a dream when a yawning man stretches his scraggy arms forth. The little tree looked woe-begone, stale, and draggled with drunken tears.

"Why, Bob, I am ashamed of you."

"Father, so am I of you."

Labels: arboricide

Excerpts from Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I:

1.2.209-212 (Prince Hal):

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.

1.3.260 (Hotspur):

...this prince of smiles...

1.3.247-248 (Earl of Worcester to Hotspur, a useful retort at family gatherings):

Farewell, kinsman. I will talk to you
When you are better tempered to attend.

2.2.24-26 (Falstaff):

Eight yards of uneven ground is threescore and ten miles afoot with me...

2.3.6-10 (Hotspur):

"The purpose you undertake is dangerous"—Why, that's certain! 'Tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.

2.4.129-131 (Falstaff):

If manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring.

2.4.133 (Falstaff):

A bad world, I say.

2.4.239-244 (Falstaff):

What, upon compulsion? Zounds, an I were at the strappado or all the racks in the world, I would not tell you on compulsion. Give you a reason on compulsion? If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.

2.4.330-332 (Prince Hal to Falstaff):

Here comes lean Jack; here comes bare-bone. How now, my sweet creature of bombast? How long is't ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?

2.4.407-411 (Falstaff masquerading as Henry IV to Prince Hal, add to collection about children resembling fathers):

That thou art my son I have partly thy mother's word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip that doth warrant me.

2.4.453-465 (Prince Hal masquerading as Henry IV to Falstaff masquerading as Prince Hal):

There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting hutch of beastliness, that swoll'n parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuff'd cloakbag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that Vanity in years? Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it? wherein neat and cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it? wherein cunning, but in craft? wherein crafty, but in villainy? wherein villainous, but in all things? wherein worthy, but in nothing?

2.4.475-476 (Falstaff masquerading as Prince Hal to Prince Hal masquerading as Henry IV):

If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!

3.1.57-59 (Glendower and Hotspur):

Glen. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hot. Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

3.1.139-145 (Hotspur):

I had rather be a kitten and cry mew
Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers.
I had rather hear a brazen canstick turned
Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree,
And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry.

3.1.165 (Hotspur):

...such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff...

3.1.171-176 (Hotspur, about Glendower):

O, he is as tedious
As a tired horse, a railing wife;
Worse than a smoky house. I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill far
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me
In any summer house in Christendom.

3.2.17 (Prince Hal):

...base newsmongers...

3.3.2-4 (Falstaff, to be said when hungry):

Do I not bate? Do I not dwindle? Why, my skin hangs about me like an old lady's loose gown! I am withered like an old applejohn.

4.2.64 (Prince Hal):

I did never see such pitiful rascals.

4.3.59-60 (Hotspur):

The King is kind; and well we know the King
Knows at what time to promise, when to pay.

5.1.75-83 (Henry IV):

...To face the garment of rebellion
With some fine colour that may please the eye
Of fickle changelings and poor discontents,
Which gape and rub the elbow at the news
Of hurlyburly innovation.
And never yet did insurrection want
Such water colours to impaint his cause,
Nor moody beggars, starving for a time
Of pell-mell havoc and confusion.

5.1.133-143 (Falstaff):

How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he bear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon—and so ends my catechism.

5.2.85-88 (Hotspur):

O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial's point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude 4.354-357:

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

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• I Was My Best Companion
  
• Solitude and Society
  
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• Horace on the Popularity of Cell Phones
  
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Ecclesiastes 1.2-4:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill (1628)

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (Down the River):

No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. He will make himself an exile from the earth and then will know at last, if he is still capable of feeling anything, the pain and agony of final loss. He will understand what the captive Zia Indians meant when they made a song out of their sickness for home:

My home over there,
Now I remember it;
And when I see that mountain far away,
Why then I weep,
Why then I weep,
Remembering my home.

The translation of the song is by Herbert J. Spinden (1879-1967), "Home Songs of the Tewa Indians," The American Museum Journal 15 (1915) 73-78 (at 73). See also his Songs of the Tewa (New York: Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, Inc., 1933). There is a biographical sketch of Spinden by Frederic W. Gleach in Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association: Presidential Portraits (Arlington: American Anthropological Association; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 73-76.

John Ruskin, letter to Susan Beever (December 17, 1873):

What translation of Aristophanes is that? I must get it. I've lost I can't tell you how much knowledge and power through false pride in refusing to read translations, though I couldn't read the original without more trouble and time than I could spare; nevertheless, you must not think this English gives you a true idea of the original. The English is much more "English" in its temper than its words. Aristophanes is far more dry, severe, and concentrated; his words are fewer, and have fuller flavor; this English is to him what currant jelly is to currants. But it's immensely useful to me.

Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), p. 41 (tr. T.G. Rosenmeyer):

We find it difficult to understand how the gods of one's faith could be subjected to Aristophanic jests. But laughter is part of the meaning, the fruitfulness, the positive side of life, and it is therefore, in the eyes of the Greeks, more godlike than the sour solemnity which we associate with piety.

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 133:

The occasional fun poked at the gods in comedy is no evidence against the religious conservatism of the common man; it is when religion is sure of itself that such amusement is permitted.

Richard Janko, The Iliad: A Commentary, Volume IV: Books 13-16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 170 (on 14.153-353):

Few Greeks ever took their gods wholly seriously: this is, perhaps, the Greeks' greatest gift to civilization.

Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Tales XI (The Bloomsbury Christening):

Mr. Nicodemus Dumps, or, as his acquaintance called him, "long Dumps," was a bachelor, six feet high, and fifty years old: cross, cadaverous, odd, and ill-natured. He was never happy but when he was miserable; and always miserable when he had the best reason to be happy. The only real comfort of his existence was to make everybody about him wretched—then he might be truly said to enjoy life.

Ambrose Bierce, The Man Out of the Nose:

The bearing of the man was one of profound dejection; indeed, the unsympathetic youth of the neighborhood, with that keen sense for visible characteristics which ever distinguishes the young male of our species, sometimes mentioned him among themselves by the name of Spoony Glum.

Cole Porter, "Brush Up On Your Shakespeare," from Kiss Me, Kate:

The girls today in society
Go for classical poetry
So to win their hearts one must quote with ease
Aeschylus and Euripides.
One must know Homer, and b'lieve me, Bo,
Sophocles, also Sappho-ho.
Unless you know Shelley and Keats and Pope,
Dainty debbies will call you a dope.
But the poet of them all
Who will start 'em simply ravin'
Is the poet people call
The bard of Stratford-on-Avon!

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
Just declaim a few lines from "Othella"
And they'll think you're a helluva fella.
If your blonde won't respond when you flatter 'er
Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer.
If she fights when her clothes you are mussing,
What are clothes? "Much Ado about Nussing."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
With the wife of the British embessida
Try a crack out of "Troilus and Cressida."
If she says she won't buy it or tike it
Make her tike it, what's more, "As You Like It."
If she says your behavior is heinous
Kick her right in the "Coriolanus."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
If you can't be a ham and do "Hamlet"
They will not give a damn or a damnlet.
Just recite an occasional sonnet
And your lap'll have "Honey" upon it.
When your baby is pleading for pleasure
Let her sample your "Measure for Measure."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now,
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.
Better mention "The Merchant Of Venice"
When her sweet pound o' flesh you would menace.
If her virtue, at first, she defends—well,
Just remind her that "All's Well That Ends Well."
And if still she won't give you a bonus
You know what Venus got from Adonis!
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now,
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.
If your goil is a Washington Heights dream
Treat the kid to "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
If she then wants an all-by-herself night
Let her rest ev'ry 'leventh or "Twelfth Night,"
If because of your heat she gets huffy
Simply play on and "Lay on, Macduffy!"
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow,
We trow, and they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now,
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.
So tonight just recite to your matey,
"Kiss me, Kate, kiss me, Kate, kiss me, Katey."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

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All translations are by Richmond Lattimore.

Iliad 4.482-487 (Simoesios, slain by Aias):

He dropped then to the ground in the dust, like some black poplar,
which in the land low-lying about a great marsh grows
smooth trimmed yet with branches growing at the uttermost tree-top:
one which a man, a maker of chariots, fells with the shining
iron, to bend it into a wheel for a fine-wrought chariot,
and the tree lies hardening by the banks of a river.

ὃ δ᾽ ἐν κονίῃσι χαμαὶ πέσεν αἴγειρος ὣς
ἥ ῥά τ᾽ ἐν εἱαμενῇ ἕλεος μεγάλοιο πεφύκει
λείη, ἀτάρ τέ οἱ ὄζοι ἐπ᾽ ἀκροτάτῃ πεφύασι·
τὴν μέν θ᾽ ἁρματοπηγὸς ἀνὴρ αἴθωνι σιδήρῳ
ἐξέταμ᾽, ὄφρα ἴτυν κάμψῃ περικαλλέϊ δίφρῳ·
ἣ μέν τ᾽ ἀζομένη κεῖται ποταμοῖο παρ᾽ ὄχθας.

Iliad 5.559-560 (Orsilochos and Krethon, slain by Aineias):

Such were these two who beaten under the hands of Aineias
crashed now to the ground as if they were two tall pine trees.

τοίω τὼ χείρεσσιν ὑπ᾽ Αἰνείαο δαμέντε
καππεσέτην, ἐλάτῃσιν ἐοικότες ὑψηλῇσι.

Iliad 13.389-391 (Asios, slain by Idomeneus) = 16.482-484 (Sarpedon, slain by Patroklos):

He fell, as when an oak goes down or a white poplar,
or like a towering pine tree which in the mountains the carpenters
have hewn down with their whetted axes to make a ship timber.

ἤριπε δ᾽ ὡς ὅτε τις δρῦς ἤριπεν ἢ ἀχερωῒς
ἠὲ πίτυς βλωθρή, τήν τ᾽ οὔρεσι τέκτονες ἄνδρες
ἐξέταμον πελέκεσσι νεήκεσι νήϊον εἶναι.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (Down the River):

While we dream and drift on the magic river the busy little men with their gargantuan appliances are hard at work, day and night, racing against the time when the people of America might possibly awake to discover something precious and irreplaceable about to be destroyed.

                              ...Nature's polluted,
There's man in every secret corner of her
Doing damned, wicked deeds.

The verse quotation is from Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death's Jest-Book, or the Fool's Tragedy, Act II, Scene III.

Excerpts from John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter V (May 1, 1871):

That telegraphic signalling was a discovery; and conceivably, some day, may be a useful one. And there was some excuse for your being a little proud when, about last sixth of April (Coeur-de-Lion's death-day, and Albert Durer's), you knotted a copper wire all the way to Bombay, and flashed a message along it, and back.

But what was the message, and what the answer? Is India the better for what you said to her? Are you the better for what she replied?

If not, you have only wasted an all-round-the-world's length of copper wire,—which is, indeed, about the sum of your doing. If you had had, perchance, two words of common-sense to say, though you had taken wearisome time and trouble to send them;—though you had written them slowly in gold, and sealed them with a hundred seals, and sent a squadron of ships of the line to carry the scroll, and the squadron had fought its way round the Cape of Good Hope, through a year of storms, with loss of all its ships but one,—the two words of common-sense would have been worth the carriage, and more. But you have not anything like so much as that to say, either to India, or to any other place.

....

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls "Railroad Enterprise." You Enterprised a Railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the Gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you Fools Everywhere.

....

A man and a woman, with their children, properly trained, are able easily to cultivate as much ground as will feed them; to build as much wall and roof as will lodge them, and to spin and weave as much cloth as will clothe them. They can all be perfectly happy and healthy in doing this. Supposing that they invent machinery which will build, plough, thresh, cook, and weave, and that they have none of these things any more to do, but may read, or play croquet, or cricket, all day long, I believe myself that they will neither be so good nor so happy as without the machines.

....

There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one "knows how to live" till he has got them.

These are, Pure Air, Water, and Earth.

....

You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any extent. Toil might easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of you. You or your fellows, German and French, are at present busy in vitiating it to the best of your power in every direction;— chiefly at this moment with corpses, and animal and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff into noxious gas. But everywhere, and all day long, you are vitiating it with foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you call towns, are little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease.

On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the trees which cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere,— is literally infinite. You might make every breath of air you draw, food.

Secondly, your power over the rain and river-waters of the earth is infinite. You can bring rain where you will, by planting wisely and tending carefully;— drought, where you will, by ravage of woods and neglect of the soil. You might have the rivers of England as pure as the crystal of the rock;— beautiful in falls, in lakes, in living pools;— so full of fish that you might take them out with your hands instead of nets. Or you may do always as you have done now, turn every river of England into a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain; and even that falls dirty.

Then for the third, Earth,— meant to be nourishing for you, and blossoming. You have learned, about it, that there is no such thing as a flower; and as far as your scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive and deathful, instead of blossoming and life-giving, Dust, can contrive, you have turned the Mother-Earth, Demeter, into the Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone — with the voice of your brother's blood crying out of it, in one wild harmony round all its murderous sphere.

A couple of months ago, while spending a day in the library at Georgia State University, I happened upon a wonderful book by Keith Thomas, his Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), from which I culled much information relevant to a topic which amounts to a monomania with me—protests against arboricide.

Now Thomas, in an essay in London Review of Books, Vol. 32, No. 11 (10 June 2010) 36-37, has given us a fascinating look at his decidedly low-tech, but highly effective, method of research:

When I go to libraries or archives, I make notes in a continuous form on sheets of paper, entering the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the length of the passage transcribed. These sliced-up pieces of paper pile up on the floor. Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic. Along with them go newspaper cuttings, lists of relevant books and articles yet to be read, and notes on anything else which might be helpful when it comes to thinking about the topic more analytically. If the notes on a particular topic are especially voluminous, I put them in a box file or a cardboard container or a drawer in a desk. I also keep an index of the topics on which I have an envelope or a file. The envelopes run into thousands.

....

My notes are voluminous because my interests have never been very narrowly focused. My subject is what I think of as the historical ethnography of early modern England. Equipped with questions posed by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, as well as by other historians, I try to look at virtually all aspects of early modern life, from the physical environment to the values and mental outlook of people at all social levels. Unfortunately, such diverse topics as literacy, numeracy, gestures, jokes, sexual morality, personal cleanliness or the treatment of animals, though central to my concerns, are hard to pursue systematically. They can't be investigated in a single archive or repository of information. Progress depends on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period. That makes them unsuitable subjects for a doctoral thesis, which has to be completed in a few years. But they are just the thing for a lifetime's reading. So when I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics. Even so, I find that, as my interests change, I have to go back to sources I read long ago, with my new preoccupations in mind.

....

When the time comes to start writing, I go through my envelopes, pick out a fat one and empty it out onto the table, to see what I have got. At this point a pattern usually forms. As Beatrice Webb rightly said, the very process of shuffling notes can be intellectually fertile. It helps one to make new connections and it raises questions to which one must try to find the answer. So after scrutinising my scraps of paper, I set about reading more systematically, often discovering in the process that somebody somewhere has already said most of what I thought I had found out for myself. If not too discouraged, I add my new notes to the old ones and try to create some coherence out of these hundreds of pieces of paper. This involves dividing the topic into a great many subheadings, writing each subheading at the top of a page of A4, stapling the relevant slips onto the appropriate page, and arranging the sheets in a consecutive order. Only then do I start writing. Compared with the labour of making, sorting and arranging notes, this is a relatively speedy business. But it is followed by a much more time-consuming task, that of travelling round the libraries to check the references in my footnotes, only too many of which, thanks to poor handwriting, carelessness and an innate tendency to 'improve' what I have read, turn out to be either slightly wrong or taken out of context. I wish I possessed the splendid insouciance of David Hume, about whom a Scottish friend said, 'Why, mon, David read a vast deal before he set about a piece of his book; but his usual seat was the sofa, and he often wrote with his legs up; and it would have been unco' fashious to have moved across the room when any little doubt occurred.'

When all my mistranscriptions have been sorted out, the task is finished. Months later, the proofs arrive, by which time more books and articles have been published and I have found several more delicious passages which cry out to be inserted. By then, of course, it is too late.

Hat tip: Languagehat.

Richard Maitland (1496-1586), Advyce to Lesom Mirriness, lines 1-16:

Quhen I haive done consider
  This warldis vanitie,
Sa brukill and sa slidder,
  Sa full of miserie;
Then I remember me    5
  That heir thair is no rest;
Thairfoir appeirentlie,
  To be mirrie is best.

Let us be blyth and glaid,
  My friendis all I pray;    10
To be pensive and sad
  Na thing it help us may.
Thairfoir put quyt away
  All heviness of thocht;
Thocht we murne nicht and day    15
  It will availl us nocht.

lesom = lawful
1 quhen = when
2 warldis = world's
3 brukill = brittle, slidder = slippery
7, 13 thairfoir = therefore
14 thocht = thought
15 thocht (should be thoch?) = though, murne = mourn, nicht = night
16 nocht = nought

Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Scenes IX (London Recreations):

In fine weather the old gentleman is almost constantly in the garden; and when it is too wet to go into it, he will look out of the window at it, by the hour together. He has always something to do there, and you will see him digging, and sweeping, and cutting, and planting, with manifest delight. In spring-time, there is no end to the sowing of seeds, and sticking little bits of wood over them, with labels, which look like epitaphs to their memory; and in the evening, when the sun has gone down, the perseverance with which he lugs a great watering-pot about is perfectly astonishing. The only other recreation he has, is the newspaper, which he peruses every day, from beginning to end, generally reading the most interesting pieces of intelligence to his wife, during breakfast.

The old lady is very fond of flowers, as the hyacinth-glasses in the parlour-window, and geranium-pots in the little front court, testify. She takes great pride in the garden too: and when one of the four fruit-trees produces rather a larger gooseberry than usual, it is carefully preserved under a wine-glass on the sideboard, for the edification of visitors, who are duly informed that Mr. So-and-so planted the tree which produced it, with his own hands.

On a summer's evening, when the large watering-pot has been filled and emptied some fourteen times, and the old couple have quite exhausted themselves by trotting about, you will see them sitting happily together in the little summerhouse, enjoying the calm and peace of the twilight, and watching the shadows as they fall upon the garden, and gradually growing thicker and more sombre, obscure the tints of their gayest flowers—no bad emblem of the years that have silently rolled over their heads, deadening in their course the brightest hues of early hopes and feelings which have long since faded away. These are their only recreations, and they require no more. They have within themselves, the materials of comfort and content; and the only anxiety of each, is to die before the other.

This is no ideal sketch. There used to be many old people of this description; their numbers may have diminished, and may decrease still more.

My great-grandparents in their garden.

Edwin Way Teale, Journey into Summer (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1960), pp. 298-299:

Among the early collectors of these relics of the past, there appears the somewhat pathetic figure of the German schoolmaster Johannes Beringer, of Würzburg. An avid fossil hunter, he took his students on frequent field trips to a nearby outcropping of soft shale. One day, as a joke, his pupils carved the image of an animal on a bit of rock. Their credulous teacher pounced on it with such enthusiasm that the hoax continued. Each subsequent field trip yielded greater treasures — frogs, flowers, insects, animals, even astronomical objects. In 1726, Beringer published his Lithographia Würceburgensis, an elaborately illustrated volume describing all his finds. Shortly afterwards, he discovered rocks containing Hebrew letters and then one with his own name inscribed on it. This was more than even his credulity could stand. Too late he realized he had been duped. In an effort to buy back every copy of his book, Beringer spent his life savings and died in poverty. Even so, his story has the ironic semblance of a happy ending. After his death, his family recouped their fortunes by selling the copies of the book as a rare curiosity.

Jorge Luis Borges, To the German Language (tr. Alastair Reid):

My destiny is in the Spanish language,
the bronze words of Francisco de Quevedo,
but in the long, slow progress of the night,
different, more intimate musics move me.
Some have been handed down to me by blood—    5
voices of Shakespeare, language of the Scriptures—
others by chance, which has been generous;
but you, gentle language of Germany,
I chose you, and I sought you out alone.
By way of grammar books and patient study,    10
through the thick undergrowth of the declensions,
the dictionary, which never puts its thumb on
the precise nuance, I kept moving closer.
My nights were full of overtones of Virgil,
I once said; but I could as well have named    15
Hölderlin, Angelus Silesius.
Heine lent me his lofty nightingales;
Goethe, the good fortune of late love,
at the same time both greedy and indulgent;
Keller, the rose which one hand leaves behind    20
in the closed fist of a dead man who adored it,
who will never know if it is white or red.
German language, you are your masterpiece:
love interwound in all your compound voices
and open vowels, sounds which accommodate    25
the studious hexameters of Greek
and undercurrents of jungles and of nights.
Once, I had you. Now, at the far extreme
of weary years, I feel you have become
as out of reach as algebra and the moon.    30

In lines 20-22 Borges refers to a poem by Gottfried Keller (1819-1890), here translated by James Joyce:

Now have I fed and eaten up the rose
Which then she laid within my stiffcold hand.
That I should ever feed upon a rose
I never had believed in liveman's land.

Only I wonder was it white or red
The flower that in the dark my food has been.
Give us, and if Thou give, thy daily bread,
Deliver us from evil, Lord, Amen.

Da hab' ich gar die Rose aufgegessen,
Die sie mir in die starre Hand gegeben!
Daß ich noch einmal würde Rosen essen,
Hätt nimmer ich geglaubt in meinem Leben!

Ich möcht' nur wissen, ob es eine rote,
Ob eine weiße Rose das gewesen?
Gib täglich uns, o Herr! von deinem Brote,
Und wenn du willst, erlös' uns von dem Bösen!

Martial 8.69:

Miraris veteres, Vacerra, solos
nec laudas nisi mortuos poetas.
Ignoscas petimus, Vacerra: tanti
non est, ut placeam tibi, perire.

Tr. Walter C.A. Ker:

You admire, Vacerra, the ancients alone, and praise none but dead poets. Your pardon, pray, Vacerra. It is not worth my while, merely to please you, to die.

Tr. William Hay:

The ancients all your veneration have:
You like no poet on this side the grave.
Yet, pray excuse me; if to please you, I
Can hardly think it worth my while to die.

Tr. Goldwin Smith:

Vacerra lauds no living poet's lays,
But for departed genius keeps his praise.
I, alas, live, nor deem it worth my while
To die, that I may win Vacerra's smile.

Tr. J. Wight Duff:

You like no bards, Vacerra, but the old:
Only dead poets you think poets true!
Pardon, Vacerra—may I make so bold?—
It's not worth dying to be liked by you.

Tr. William Matthews:

There are poets you praise,
But I notice they're all dead.
I'd rather find another way
to please you, friend, instead.

Tr. James Michie:

Rigidly classical, you save
Your praise for poets in the grave.
Forgive me, it's not worth my while
Dying to earn your critical smile.

Lessing imitated Martial in this little epigram:

Du lobest Todte nur? Vax, deines Lobes wegen
Hab' ich blutwenig Lust, mich bald in's Grab zu legen.

That is,

You praise only the dead? Vax, even to win your praise,
I have very little desire to lie down in my grave anytime soon.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. havoc:

[a. AFr. havok, altered in some way from OF. havot (c1150 in Du Cange, havo), used in same sense, esp. in phrase crier havot. Prob. of Teutonic origin.]

Du Cange, Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae Latinitatis, s.v. havo:

Odo de Diogilo lib. 4. de Ludovici VII. profect. in Orient. pag. 42: Veniunt de exercitu, qui cambiunt necessaria, junguntur et illis, qui ambiunt non sua. Igitur una die Flandrensis quidam dignus flagris et flamma, cernens immensas divitias, et immoderata cupiditate caecatus, clamat, Havo, Havo, rapiens, quod cupivit, etc. Flandris, Have, sunt divitiae, opes, pecuniae, etc. ex Lat. Habere. Sic clamabat ille: Quot bona, quot bona! ut alios ad praedam invitaret.

Du Cange is citing Odo of Deuil, De Ludovici VII profectione in Orientem, i.e. The Journey of Louis VII to the East, tr. Virginia Gingerick Berry:

From the army came people who were bartering for necessities, and they were joined by men who coveted the supplies of others. One day, therefore, a certain Fleming, fit to be scourged and burned in Hell, seeing the great wealth and blinded by immoderate greed, cried, "Havo! Havo!" seizing what he wished.

Anatoly Liberman, A Bibliography of English Etymology: Sources and Word List (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 621, s.v. havoc, cites:

Anonymous. 1889ii; Bernard, Thomas L. 1976; Grondhound, C. 1884: 354-5; J.C. 1877; Susenmihl, Ernst. 1855:329.

The names Grondhound and Susenmihl are incorrect. The first is a reference to C. Grondhoud, "Doublets in English, II" Taalstudie 5 (1884) 349-364 (at 354-355), and the second is a reference to Ernst Susemihl, "Zur Geschichte und Etymologie der englischen Sprache," Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 18 (1855) 321-43 (at 329). Grondhoud (with Trench and others before him) posited a connection between havoc and hawk, but I don't know if anyone today takes that theory seriously. See Walter W. Skeat, Notes on English Etymology, Chiefly Reprinted from the Transactions of the Philological Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), pp. 128-129, for more speculation on the etymology of havoc.

The OED defines havoc as:

1. In the phrase cry havoc, orig. to give to an army the order havoc!, as the signal for the seizure of spoil, and so of general spoliation or pillage. In later use (usually after Shakes.) fig., and associated with sense 2.

2. Devastation, destruction; esp. in phr. to make havoc, play havoc (freq. const. with), in which the earlier sense of spoliation or plunder has gradually passed into that of destructive devastation. Also in weakened sense: confusion and disorder, disarray. The phrases to work havoc, create havoc are also common.

One can also wreak (but please not reek or wreck) havoc. See OED, s.v. wreak, sense 8.b.: "To cause or effect (harm, damage, etc.), esp. in phr. to wreak havoc."

Excerpts from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Remorse: A Tragedy:

I.1.4-7 (Alvar):

If aught on earth demand an unmix'd feeling,
'Tis surely this—after long years of exile,
To step forth on firm land, and gazing round us,
To hail at once our country, and our birth-place.

I.1.20-24 (Zulimez):

Remorse is as the heart in which it grows:
If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews
Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy,
It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the inmost
Weeps only tears of poison!

I.1.108-109 (Alvar):

And what the mind believes impossible,
The bodily sense is slow to recognize.

I.2.322 (Alhadra):

There is no room in this heart for puling love-tales.

II.2.34-36 (Valdez):

My child, we must not give religious faith
To every voice which makes the heart a listener
To its own wish.

V.1.157-165 (Alvar):

Thou blind self-worshipper! thy pride, thy cunning,
Thy faith in universal villainy,
Thy shallow sophisms, thy pretended scorn
For all thy human brethren—out upon them!
What have they done for thee? have they given thee peace?
Cured thee of starting in thy sleep? or made
The darkness pleasant when thou wak'st at midnight?
Art happy when alone? Can'st walk by thyself
With even step and quiet cheerfulness?

William Wordsworth, The Excursion 7.590-631:

I feel at times a motion of despite    590
Towards one, whose bold contrivances and skill,
As you have seen, bear such conspicuous part
In works of havoc; taking from these vales,
One after one, their proudest ornaments.
Full oft his doings leave me to deplore    595
Tall ash-tree, sown by winds, by vapours nursed,
In the dry crannies of the pendent rocks;
Light birch, aloft upon the horizon's edge,
A veil of glory for the ascending moon;
And oak whose roots by noontide dew were damped,    600
And on whose forehead inaccessible
The raven lodged in safety.—Many a ship
Launched into Morecambe-bay, to him hath owed
Her strong knee-timbers, and the mast that bears
The loftiest of her pendants; He, from park    605
Or forest, fetched the enormous axle-tree
That whirls (how slow itself!) ten thousand spindles:
And the vast engine labouring in the mine,
Content with meaner prowess, must have lacked
The trunk and body of its marvellous strength,    610
If his undaunted enterprise had failed
Among the mountain coves. Yon household fir,
A guardian planted to fence off the blast,
But towering high the roof above, as if
Its humble destination were forgot—    615
That sycamore, which annually holds
Within its shade, as in a stately tent
On all sides open to the fanning breeze,
A grave assemblage, seated while they shear
The fleece-encumbered flock—the JOYFUL ELM,    620
Around whose trunk the maidens dance in May—
And the LORD'S OAK — would plead their several rights
In vain, if he were master of their fate;
His sentence to the axe would doom them all.
But, green in age and lusty as he is,    625
And promising to keep his hold on earth
Less, as might seem, in rivalship with men
Than with the forest's more enduring growth,
His own appointed hour will come at last;
And, like the haughty Spoilers of the world,    630
This keen Destroyer, in his turn, must fall.

The oak "on whose forehead inaccessible / the raven lodged in safety" (601-602) brings to mind Gilbert White's raven tree. Cf. also Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Raven: A Christmas Tale, Told by a Schoolboy to his Little Brothers and Sisters:

Underneath a huge oak tree
There was, of swine, a huge company,
That grunted as they crunched the mast:
For that was ripe, and fell full fast.
Then they trotted away, for the wind grew high:    5
One acorn they left, and no more might you spy.
Next came a Raven, that liked not such folly:
He belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy!

Blacker was he than blackest jet,
Flew low in the rain, and his feathers not wet.    10
He picked up the acorn and buried it straight
By the side of a river both deep and great.

        Where then did the Raven go?
        He went high and low,
Over hill, over dale, did the black Raven go.    15
        Many autumns, many springs
        Travelled he with wandering wings:
        Many summers, many winters—
        I can't tell half his adventures.

At length he came back, and with him a She,    20
And the acorn was grown to a tall oak tree.
They built them a nest in the topmost bough,
And young ones they had, and were happy enow.
But soon came a woodman in leathern guise,
His brow, like a pent-house, hung over his eyes.    25
He'd an axe in his hand, not a word he spoke,
But with many a hem! and a sturdy stroke,
At length he brought down the poor Raven's own oak.
His young ones were killed; for they could not depart,
And their mother did die of a broken heart.    30

The boughs from the trunk the woodman did sever;
And they floated it down on the course of the river
They sawed it in planks, and its bark they did strip,
And with this tree and others they made a good ship.
The ship, it was launched; but in sight of the land    35
Such a storm there did rise as no ship could withstand.
It bulged on a rock, and the waves rushed in fast:
The old Raven flew round and round, and cawed to the blast.
He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls—
See! see! o'er the topmast the mad water rolls!    40
    Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet,
And Death riding home on a cloud he did meet,
And he thank'd him again and again for this treat:
    They had taken his all, and Revenge was sweet!

Coleridge first published the poem anonymously in the Morning Post (March 10, 1798), with a mock attribution to Edmund Spenser. It circulated earlier in manuscript, as Charles Lamb quotes from it in a letter to Coleridge (February 5, 1797).

Labels: arboricide

Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 477 with note on p. 691:

Another spiritual descendant of Niebuhr, but as patriotic a Frenchman as Mommsen was a German, was Numa-Denys Fustel de Coulanges (1830-89). Just as Ranke made his reputation by going behind the historians to the archives and reading the actual reports of the Venetian ambassadors, so Fustel de Coulanges demanded evidence, in the shape of a Greek or Roman document, for any assertion about ancient history. His favorite question was 'Avez-vous un texte?' and he boasted of being the only man who had read every Latin text from the sixth century B.C. to the tenth century of the Christian era.<sup>15

15</sup> Fustel's fault as a historian, which is apparent as early as La Cité antique, was that although he insisted that every assertion must be supported by a document, he did not criticize the documents themselves so far as to recognize that even a contemporary narrative may be vitiated by mistakes, or lies, or interpolations. There is a good description of his work by C. Seignobos in Petit de Julleville's Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, 8. 279-96.

But "Avez-vous un texte?" for the assertion that Fustel said "Avez-vous un texte?"?

Seignobos (op. cit., published in 1899) doesn't quote these words. The closest he comes is on p. 284:

Très défiant à l'égard des systèmes qui dans notre siècle ont encombré l'histoire au point de cacher la vue du passé, il rejetait systématiquement toute étude de seconde main et s'astreignait à chercher toujours les faits dans l'analyse des documents. «L'historien, dit-il, doit se borner aux textes attentivement observés.» — «Lire les textes» ou «Cela n'est pas dans les textes», ces formules revenaient comme un refrain dans ses ouvrages et dans son enseignement.

The earliest attribution of "Avez-vous un texte?" to Fustel in Ogle Books (what a friend calls Google Books when it offers only a "snippet view") dates from 1915, viz., Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), La science allemande (Paris: A. Hermann, 1915), p. 90. This is more than 25 years after Fustel's death, but must be given great weight, as Duhem was a student at the École normale when Fustel was director.

I also find a first-hand quotation of something very much like "Avez-vous un texte?" in Salomon Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908), p. 196:

Ayant eu l'occasion, à plusieurs reprises, d'exprimer à M. d'Arbois de Jubainville la pensée que le druidisme avait été hostile aux images, j'ai toujours reçu du maître des études celtiques en France cette réponse un peu décourageante: «Avez-vous un texte qui le prouve»?

Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville lived from 1827 to 1910. He criticized Fustel harshly in Deux manières d'écrire l'histoire (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1896).

The scholar's insistence on a text is a trait that lends itself to mockery, e.g.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (June 1855): "A scholar is a man with this inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know."
  
• Montaigne, Essais 1.25 (tr. E.J. Trechmann): "I know one who, when I question him on what he knows, asks me for a book to show it me, and will not venture to tell me he has an itchy backside without straightway consulting his lexicon to find the meaning of 'itchy' and of 'backside'."

Hat tip: Brandon Watson at Siris, to whom I offer congratulations on six years of blogging.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Diary (January 12, 1850):

How little the all-important art of making meaning pellucid is studied now! Hardly any popular writer, except myself, thinks of it. Many seem to aim at being obscure. Indeed, they may be right enough in one sense; for many readers give credit for profundity to whatever is obscure, and call all that is perspicuous shallow. But coraggio! and think of A.D. 2850. Where will your Emersons be then? But Herodotus will still be read with delight. We must do our best to be read too.

James Boswell, Journal (March 14, 1765):

WILKES. 'Never a moment in my life low-spirited.' BOSWELL. 'What shall I do to get life over?' WILKES. 'While there's all ancient and modern learning and all arts and sciences, enough for life if three thousand years.' BOSWELL. 'Fate and free will?' WILKES. 'Let 'em alone.'

Id. (March 15, 1765):

WILKES. 'I'm always happy. I thank God for good health, good spirits and the love of books....Thank heaven for having given me the love of women. To many she gives not the noble passion of lust.'

Charles Spencelayh, Morning Chapter

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal C.218 (November 7?, 1837):

"Miracles have ceased." Have they indeed? When? They had not ceased this afternoon when I walked into the wood and got into bright, miraculous sunshine, in shelter from the roaring wind. Who sees a pine-cone, or the turpentine exuding from the tree, or a leaf, the unit of vegetation, fall from its bough, as if it said, "the year is finished," or hears in the quiet, piny glen the chickadee chirping his cheerful note, or walks along the lofty promontory-like ridges which, like natural causeways, traverse the morass, or gazes upward at the rushing clouds, or downward at a moss or a stone and says to himself, "Miracles have ceased"?

George Meredith, The Wild Rose:

High climbs June's wild rose,
Her bush all blooms in a swarm;
And swift from the bud she blows,
In a day when the wooer is warm;
Frank to receive and give,
Her bosom is open to bee and sun:
Pride she has none,
Nor shame she knows;
Happy to live.

Unlike those of the garden nigh,
Her queenly sisters enthroned by art;
Loosening petals one by one
To the fiery Passion's dart
Superbly shy.
For them in some glory of hair,
Or nest of the heaving mounds to lie,
Or path of the bride bestrew.
Ever are they the theme for song.
But nought of that is her share.
Hardly from wayfarers tramping along,
A glance they care not to renew.

And she at a word of the claims of kin
Shrinks to the level of roads and meads:
She is only a plain princess of the weeds,
As an outcast witless of sin:
Much disregarded, save by the few
Who love her, that has not a spot of deceit,
No promise of sweet beyond sweet,
Often descending to sour.
On any fair breast she would die in an hour.
Praises she scarce could bear,
Were any wild poet to praise.
Her aim is to rise into light and air.
One of the darlings of Earth, no more,
And little it seems in the dusty ways,
Unless to the grasses nodding beneath;
The bird clapping wings to soar,
The clouds of an evetide's wreath.

I don't know if this is the same as John Clare's wild rose in his sonnet The Hedge Rose:

The wild rose swells its prickly buds anew
& soon shall wear the summers witching hue
Those hues which nature as its dowery heirs
& beauty like a blossom wins & wears
On her soft cheeks when shepherds in the grove
Reach down the blushing flowers & talk of love
The very bees that such intrusions scare
Frit from the blossom that he culls her there
Flye round mistaken as they leave the bower
& take the maids sweet blushes for a flower
Thus wild dog roseys hung in every hedge
Wakens at joys hearts core its sweetest pledge
Shedding to summer lanes their rich perfume
& whispering memorys raptures while they bloom

Excerpts from John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter II (February 1, 1871):

"Employers." It is a noble title. If, indeed, they have found you idle, and given you employment, wisely,— let us no more call them mere "Men" of Business, but rather "Angels" of Business: quite the best sort of Guardian Angel.

Yet are you sure it is necessary, absolutely, to look to superior natures for employment? Is it inconceivable that you should employ—yourselves?

....

The labour producing no useful result was demoralizing. All such labour is.

The labour producing useful result was educational in its influence on the temper. All such labour is.

G.K. Chesterton, A Certain Nation, last stanza:

Thou hast a right to rule thyself; to be
The thing thou wilt; to grin, to fawn, to creep:
To crown these clumsy liars; ay, and we
Who knew thee once, we have a right to weep.

Chesterton meant France in 1899; some other possibilities come to mind in 2010.

Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, Letter II:

In the centre of this grove there stood an oak, which, though shapely and tall on the whole, bulged out into a large excrescence about the middle of the stem. On this a pair of ravens had fixed their residence for such a series of years, that the oak was distinguished by the title of The Raven Tree. Many were the attempts of the neighbouring youths to get at this eyry: the difficulty whetted their inclinations, and each was ambitious of surmounting the arduous task. But when they arrived at the swelling, it jutted out so in their way, and was so far beyond their grasp, that the most daring lads were awed, and acknowledged the undertaking to be too hazardous. So the ravens built on, nest upon nest, in perfect security, till the fatal day arrived in which the wood was to be levelled. It was in the month of February, when those birds usually sit. The saw was applied to the butt, the wedges were inserted into the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy blows of the beetle, or mallet, the tree nodded to its fall; but still the dam sat on. At last, when it gave way, the bird was flung from her nest; and, though her parental affection deserved a better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which brought her dead to the ground.

Id., Letter XXVIII (January 8, 1776):

At the south corner of the Plestor, or area near the church, there stood, about twenty years ago, a very old grotesque hollow pollard-ash, which, for ages, had been looked on with no small veneration as a shrew-ash. Now a shrew-ash is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the pains which a beast suffers from the running of a shrew-mouse over the part affected: for it is supposed that a shrew-mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a nature, that wherever it creeps over a beast, be it horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel anguish, and threatened with the loss of the use of the limb. Against this accident, to which they were continually liable, our provident forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, when once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrew-ash was made thus:—Into the body of the tree a deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrew-mouse was thrust in alive, and plugged in, no doubt with several quaint incantations long since forgotten. As the ceremonies necessary for such a consecration are no longer understood, all succession is at an end, and no such tree is known to subsist in the manor or hundred.

As to that on the Plestor,

"The late vicar stubb'd and burn'd it,"

when he was way-warden, regardless of the remonstrances of the bystanders, who interceded in vain for its preservation, urging its power and efficacy, and alleging that it had been

"Religione patrum multos servata per annos."

"The late vicar stubb'd and burn'd it"—a misquotation, obviously from memory, of Jonathan Swift, Baucis and Philemon, line 178: "So, the next parson stubbed and burnt it."

"Religione patrum multos servata per annos"—a quotation of Vergil, Aeneid 2.715 (in H. Rushton Fairclough's translation, "saved for many years by the reverence of our fathers").

Labels: arboricide

Excerpts from John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter I (January 1, 1871):

I have listened to many ingenious persons, who say we are better off now than ever we were before. I do not know how well off we were before; but I know positively that many very deserving persons of my acquaintance have great difficulty in living under these improved circumstances: also, that my desk is full of begging letters, eloquently written either by distressed or dishonest people; and that we cannot be called, as a nation, well off, while so many of us are living either in honest or in villainous beggary.

....

As you would find it thus impossible to class me justly in either party, so you would find it impossible to class any person whatever, who had clear and developed political opinions, and who could define them accurately. Men only associate in parties by sacrificing their opinions, or by having none worth sacrificing; and the effect of party government is always to develop hostilities and hypocrisies, and to extinguish ideas.

....

The first object of all work — not the principal one, but the first and necessary one — is to get food, clothes, lodging, and fuel.

It is quite possible to have too much of all these things. I know a great many gentlemen, who eat too large dinners; a great many ladies, who have too many clothes. I know there is lodging to spare in London, for I have several houses there myself, which I can't let. And I know there is fuel to spare everywhere, since we get up steam to pound the roads with, while our men stand idle; or drink till they can't stand, idle, or any otherwise.

Notwithstanding, there is agonizing distress even in this highly-favoured England, in some classes, for want of food, clothes, lodging, and fuel.

Robert Louis Stevenson, A College Magazine, I:

All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory.

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word: things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann....But enough has been said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper.

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way.