Long.

Kurt's been in the mood ...

The train put wheels under them and here they run down the long road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.

Ray Bradbury, from Something Wicked This Way Comes

Fantastically-Dressed.

By the light of torches which four fantastically-dressed figures held above their heads, the prisoners saw a semi-circle of some dozen men, masked, cloaked and booted, who were grouped behind a hideous-looking devil who sat upon a barrel.

A painted mask that gleamed with phosphorous hid his real features and gave him a terrifying appearance.  From his shoulders a ragged but voluminous cloak served as a hellish backdrop to his agile figure, clad in a weather-beaten black riding suit which was completed with tight-fitting black boots drawn up to the thighs.

Upon his head was a high-brimmed black three-cornered hat from which flowed long wisps of horse hair and was trimmed with the tail of raven's feathers.  From the side pockets of the jacket there showed the heavy butts of horse pistols, and from a heavy belt, which supported a brace of small pistols, hung a long sword.

Russell Thorndike, from The Amazing Quest of Dr. Syn

Happy Birthday, Coleridge

Allston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1814

TO the RIVER OTTER

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!

 How many various-fated years have passed,

What happy and what mournful hours, since last

I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,

Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed

Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes

I never shut amid the sunny ray,

But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,

Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,

And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,

Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,

Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled

Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:

Ah! that once more I were a careless child!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born on this day in 1772

Happy Birthday, Great-Grandpa Firchau

My namesake, Carl Robert Firchau, was born on this day in 1884.

The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions but by his habitual acts. 

Blaise Pascal

Scarecrow.

Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color 1964 presentation of the Thorndike classic, Dr. Syn: Alias, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh ...

Loitering.

CAMBRIDGE

It was a dreary morning when the wheels

Rolled over a wide plain o’erhung with clouds,

And nothing cheered our way till first we saw

The long-roofed chapel of King’s College lift

Turrets and pinnacles in answering files,

Extended high above a dusky grove.

Advancing, we espied upon the road

A student clothed in gown and tasselled cap,

Striding along as if o’ertasked by Time,

Or covetous of exercise and air;

He passed,—nor was I master of my eyes

Till he was left an arrow’s flight behind.

As near and nearer to the spot we drew,

It seemed to suck us in with an eddy’s force.

Onward we drove beneath the castle; caught,

While crossing Magdalene Bridge, a glimpse of Cam;

And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn.

The Evangelist St. John my patron was:

Three Gothic courts are his, and in the first

Was my abiding-place, a nook obscure;

Right underneath, the college kitchens made

A humming sound less tunable than bees,

But hardly less industrious; with shrill notes

Of sharp command and scolding intermixed.

Near me hung Trinity’s loquacious clock,

Who never let the quarters, night or day,

Slip by him unproclaimed, and told the hours

Twice over with a male and female voice.

Her pealing organ was my neighbor too;

And from my pillow, looking forth by light

Of moon or favoring stars, I could behold

The antechapel where the statue stood

Of Newton, with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind forever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

All winter long, whenever free to choose,

Did I by night frequent the college groves

And tributary walks; the last, and oft

The only one, who had been lingering there

Through hours of silence, till the porter’s bell,

A punctual follower on the stroke of nine,

Rang, with its blunt, unceremonious voice,

Inexorable summons! Lofty elms,

Inviting shades of opportune recess,

Bestowed composure on a neighborhood

Unpeaceful in itself. A single tree,

With sinuous trunk, boughs exquisitely wreathed,

Grew there; an ash which winter for himself

Decked as in pride, and with outlandish grace:

Up from the ground, and almost to the top,

The trunk and every master branch were green

With clustering ivy, and the lightsome twigs

And outer spray profusely tipped with seeds

That hung in yellow tassels, while the air

Stirred them, not voiceless. Often have I stood

Foot-bound, uplooking at this lovely tree

Beneath a frosty moon. The hemisphere

Of magic fiction verse of mine perchance

May never tread; but scarcely Spenser’s self

Could have more tranquil visions in his youth,

Or could more bright appearance create

Of human forms with superhuman powers,

Than I beheld, loitering on calm, clear nights,

Alone, beneath this fairy work of earth.

William Wordsworth

Introduced.

The world was introduced to U2 on this day in 1980.

"Twilight"...

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, "Kings Road"

'Bout time to drive the Coronet to The Berry Barn and load some heavy ordnance  ...

Brian Johnson, "Gimme Some Lovin'"

I love it when a cover is better than the original.

Recurrence.

Steve's pointing to Joseph Campbell ...

Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to nullify they unremitting recurrence of death.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, "A Thing about You"

Hard Promises is Petty's best album.

Happy Birthday, Petty

Tom Petty was born on this day in 1950.

"Swingin'"...

Well-Risen.

The full moon, well-risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air. When we think of the downs, we think of the downs in daylight, as with think of a rabbit with its fur on. Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not: and we do not usually envisage the downs without daylight, even though the light is not a part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it us utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that event the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity---so much lower than that of daylight---makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.

Richard Adams, from Watership Down

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Hushed.

OCTOBER

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—

For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

Robert Frost

Antognini, Lux Aeterna

The Phoenix Chamber Choir performs ...

Thief.

Modigliani, Self-portrait, 1919

The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one--and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ... so the poet is actually a thief of Fire!  He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found … of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought.

Arthur Rimbaud

Infinitude.

Poortvliet, Untitled, 1977

The FAR FIELD

I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:

Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel

Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,

The road lined with snow-laden second growth,

A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,

Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,

And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,

The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,

Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,

Where the car stalls,

Churning in a snowdrift

Until the headlights darken.

II

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,

Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,

Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,

Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,

Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --

One learned of the eternal;

And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles

(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)

And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,

Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,

Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,

My grief was not excessive.

For to come upon warblers in early May

Was to forget time and death:

How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,

And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, --

Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, --

Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,

Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,

Still for a moment,

Then pitching away in half-flight,

Lighter than finches,

While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,

And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

-- Or to lie naked in sand,

In the silted shallows of a slow river,

Fingering a shell,

Thinking:

Once I was something like this, mindless,

Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;

Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;

Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,

Believing:

I'll return again,

As a snake or a raucous bird,

Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,

The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,

The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,

The wheel turning away from itself,

The sprawl of the wave,

The on-coming water.

III

The river turns on itself,

The tree retreats into its own shadow.

I feel a weightless change, a moving forward

As of water quickening before a narrowing channel

When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;

Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent

And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --

At first a swift rippling between rocks,

Then a long running over flat stones

Before descending to the alluvial plane,

To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.

The slightly trembling water

Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;

And the crabs bask near the edge,

The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,

A point outside the glittering current;

My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,

At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,

My mind moves in more than one place,

In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,

The dry scent of a dying garden in September,

The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.

What I love is near at hand,

Always, in earth and air.

IV

The lost self changes,

Turning toward the sea,

A sea-shape turning around, --

An old man with his feet before the fire,

In robes of green, in garments of adieu.

A man faced with his own immensity

Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.

The murmur of the absolute, the why

Of being born falls on his naked ears.

His spirit moves like monumental wind

That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.

He is the end of things, the final man.

All finite things reveal infinitude:

The mountain with its singular bright shade

Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,

The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;

Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,

A scent beloved of bees;

Silence of water above a sunken tree :

The pure serene of memory in one man, --

A ripple widening from a single stone

Winding around the waters of the world.

Theodore Roethke

Diffused.

Klimt, Buchenwald I, 1902

Poetry is the language of the gods. I love poems myself. But poetry is not only in poems; it is diffused everywhere, it is around us. Look at those trees, that sky on all sides there is the breath of beauty, and of life, and where there is life and beauty, there is poetry also.

Ivan Turgenev

Scarecrow.

So the King told all his soldiers,

“Hang him high or hang him low!

But never return

‘Til the day I learn

He’s gone in the flames below;

Or you’ll hang —

With the great Scarecrow!”

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,

Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,

Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie.

Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Sheen.

Rackham, Jack Frost, 1910

THE FROST

The frost looked forth one still, clear night,

And whispered, Now I shall be out of sight;

So through the valley and over the height,

In silence I'll take my way.

I will not go on like that blustering train,

The wind and the snow, the hail and the rain,

Who make so much bustle and noise in vain,

But I'll be as busy as they!

Then he flew to the mountain, and powdered its crest;

He lit on the trees, and their boughs he drest

In diamond beads -- and over the breast

Of the quivering lake, he spread

A coat of mail, that it need not fear

The downward point of many a spear,

That he hung on its margin, far and near,

Where a rock could rear its head.

He went to the windows of those who slept,

And over each pane, like a fairy, crept;

Wherever he breathed, wherever he stepped,

By the light of the morn were seen

Most beautiful things; there were flowers and trees;

There were bevies of birds and swarms of bees;

There were cities with temples and towers; and these

All pictured in silver sheen!

But he did one thing that was hardly fair

He peeped in the cupboard, and finding there,

That all had forgotten for him to prepare,

Now, just to set them a-thinking,

I'll bite this basket of fruit, said he,

This costly pitcher I'll burst in three;

And the glass of water they've left for me

Shall 'tchick!' to tell them I'm drinking!

 Hannah Flagg Gould

Rises.

Hear the voice of the Bard,

Who present, past, and future, sees;

            Whose ears have heard

            The Holy Word

That walked among the ancient trees;

      Calling the lapsed soul,

And weeping in the evening dew;

            That might control

            The starry pole,

And fallen, fallen light renew!

      O Earth, O Earth, return!

Arise from out the dewy grass!

            Night is worn,

            And the morn

Rises from the slumbrous mass.

      Turn away no more;

Why wilt thou turn away?

            The starry floor,

            The watery shore,

Is given thee till the break of day.

William Blake

Happy Birthday, Wren

Kneller, Sir Christopher Wren, 1711

We need need not fear diminishing a miracle by explaining it.

Sir Christopher Wren, born on this day in 1632.

Gresham College professor, Sarah Hart, presents a lecture titled "The Mathematical Life of Sir Christopher Wren ...

In 2010, The Hammock Papers celebrated Wren's birthday.

Peace.

The peace of great doors be for you.

Wait at the knobs, at the panel oblongs.

Wait for the great hinges.

The peace of great churches be for you,

Where the players of loft pipe organs

Practice old lovely fragments, alone.

The peace of great books be for you,

Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,

Bleach of the light of years held in leather.

The peace of great prairies be for you.

Listen among windplayers in cornfields,

The wind learning over its oldest music

The peace of great seas be for you.

Wait on a hook of land, a rock footing

For you, wait in the salt wash.

The peace of great mountains be for you,

The sleep and the eyesight of eagles,

Sheet mist shadows and the long look across.

The peace of great hearts be for you,

Valves of the blood of the sun,

Pumps of the strongest wants we cry.

The peace of great silhouettes be for you,

Shadow dancers alive in your blood now,

Alive and crying, “Let us out, let us out.”

The peace of great changes be for you.

Whisper, Oh beginners in the hills.

Tumble, Oh cubs—to-morrow belongs to you.

The peace of great loves be for you.

Rain, soak these roots; wind, shatter the dry rot.

Bars of sunlight, grips of the earth, hug these.

The peace of great ghosts be for you,

Phantoms of night-gray eyes, ready to go

To the fog-star dumps, to the fire-white doors.

Yes, the peace of great phantoms be for you,

Phantom iron men, mothers of bronze,

Keepers of the lean clean breeds.

Carl Sandburg

Happy Birthday, Rimbaud

If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. 

That’s obvious to me: 

I witness the unfolding of my own thought: 

I watch it, I hear it: 

I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.

Arthur Rimbaud, born on this day in 1854

Eddie Money, "Trinidad"

'Tis the season ...

Jethro Tull, "Songs from the Wood"

Blue.

The world was introduced to The Specials on this day in 1979.

"Concrete Jungle"...

Happy Birthday, Tosh

Winston Hubert McIntosh,  Peter Tosh, was born on this day in 1944.

"Pick Myself Up" ...

Released.

Styx released Cornerstone on this day in 1979.

"Borrowed Time" ...

Released.

Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers released Damn the Torpedoes on this day in 1979.

"Shadow of a Doubt (Complex Kid) ...

Marvellous.

Kelley, The Sequestered Situation of This Church Seems Always to Have Made It a Favorite Haunt of Troubled Spirits, 1991

When the dance was at an end, Ichabod was attracted to a knot of the sager folks, who, with Old Van Tassel, sat smoking at one end of the piazza, gossiping over former times, and drawing out long stories about the war.

This neighborhood, at the time of which I am speaking, was one of those highly favored places which abound with chronicle and great men. The British and American line had run near it during the war; it had, therefore, been the scene of marauding and infested with refugees, cowboys, and all kinds of border chivalry. Just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and, in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the hero of every exploit.

There was the story of Doffue Martling, a large blue-bearded Dutchman, who had nearly taken a British frigate with an old iron nine-pounder from a mud breastwork, only that his gun burst at the sixth discharge. And there was an old gentleman who shall be nameless, being too rich a mynheer to be lightly mentioned, who, in the battle of White Plains, being an excellent master of defence, parried a musket-ball with a small sword, insomuch that he absolutely felt it whiz round the blade, and glance off at the hilt; in proof of which he was ready at any time to show the sword, with the hilt a little bent. There were several more that had been equally great in the field, not one of whom but was persuaded that he had a considerable hand in bringing the war to a happy termination.

But all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that succeeded. The neighborhood is rich in legendary treasures of the kind. Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered, long-settled retreats; but are trampled under foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps the reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our long-established Dutch communities.

The immediate cause, however, of the prevalence of supernatural stories in these parts, was doubtless owing to the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land. Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at Van Tassel’s, and, as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderful legends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, and mourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major André was taken, and which stood in the neighborhood. Some mention was made also of the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm, having perished there in the snow. The chief part of the stories, however, turned upon the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow, the Headless Horseman, who had been heard several times of late, patrolling the country; and, it was said, tethered his horse nightly among the graves in the churchyard.

The sequestered situation of this church seems always to have made it a favorite haunt of troubled spirits. It stands on a knoll, surrounded by locust-trees and lofty elms, from among which its decent, whitewashed walls shine modestly forth, like Christian purity beaming through the shades of retirement. A gentle slope descends from it to a silver sheet of water, bordered by high trees, between which, peeps may be caught at the blue hills of the Hudson. To look upon its grass-grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace. On one side of the church extends a wide woody dell, along which raves a large brook among broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees. Over a deep black part of the stream, not far from the church, was formerly thrown a wooden bridge; the road that led to it, and the bridge itself, were thickly shaded by overhanging trees, which cast a gloom about it, even in the daytime; but occasioned a fearful darkness at night. Such was one of the favorite haunts of the Headless Horseman, and the place where he was most frequently encountered. The tale was told of old Brouwer, a most heretical disbeliever in ghosts, how he met the Horseman returning from his foray into Sleepy Hollow, and was obliged to get up behind him; how they galloped over bush and brake, over hill and swamp, until they reached the bridge; when the Horseman suddenly turned into a skeleton, threw old Brouwer into the brook, and sprang away over the tree-tops with a clap of thunder.

This story was immediately matched by a thrice marvellous adventure of Brom Bones, who made light of the Galloping Hessian as an arrant jockey. He affirmed that on returning one night from the neighboring village of Sing Sing, he had been overtaken by this midnight trooper; that he had offered to race with him for a bowl of punch, and should have won it too, for Daredevil beat the goblin horse all hollow, but just as they came to the church bridge, the Hessian bolted, and vanished in a flash of fire.

All these tales, told in that drowsy undertone with which men talk in the dark, the countenances of the listeners only now and then receiving a casual gleam from the glare of a pipe, sank deep in the mind of Ichabod. He repaid them in kind with large extracts from his invaluable author, Cotton Mather, and added many marvellous events that had taken place in his native State of Connecticut, and fearful sights which he had seen in his nightly walks about Sleepy Hollow.

Washington Irving, from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Resentment.

Resentment can be transformed into a governing emotion and a social cause, and thereby gain release from the constraints that normally contain it. This happens when resentment loses the specificity of its target, and becomes directed to society as a whole. That, it seems to me, is what happens when left-wing movements take over. In such cases resentment ceases to be a response to another’s unmerited success and becomes instead an existential posture: the posture of the one whom the world has betrayed. Such a person does not seek to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person. He will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will conceive in collective terms, as the class, group or race that hitherto controlled the world and which must now in turn be controlled. And all institutions that grant protection to that class or a voice in the political process will be targets for his destructive rage. That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

Excellent.

An (nearly) excellent album ...

Relativism.

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

Indeed.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Haydn, Keyboard Sonata in D-Major, Hob.XVI:37

Olivia Steimel performs ...

Wins.

High.

SONNET to a STILTON CHEESE

Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour

And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;

England has need of thee, and so have I–

She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,

League after grassy league from Lincoln tower

To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.

Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,

Like a tall green volcano rose in power.

Plain living and long drinking are no more,

And pure religion reading “Household Words”,

And sturdy manhood sitting still all day

Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;

While my digestion, like the House of Lords,

The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.

G. K Chesterton

Tradition.

I am not so arrogant as to think that just because I’ve seen someone make Peking duck in Beijing that I’ll have something to add to the process after only a brief encounter. Most of the time, the dishes I see made or eat are the end result of a lifetime of trial and error–and hundreds if not thousands of years of tradition. 

Anthony Bourdain

Liberating.

AMERICA, THE BEAUTIFUL

O beautiful for spacious skies,

   For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

   Above the fruited plain!

      America!  America!

   God shed His grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

   From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,

   Whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

   Across the wilderness!

      America! America!

   God mend thine every flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

   Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved

   In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country loved,

   And mercy more than life!

      America!  America!

   May God thy gold refine

Till all success be nobleness,

   And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream

   That sees beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam

   Undimmed by human tears!

      America!  America!

   God shed His grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

   From sea to shining sea!

Katharine Bates

David Francey, "The Breath Between"

Another year that's had us see

The passing into memory

Souls and hearts, and voices stilled

Before that sun could climb the hill

We hold them close, and we carry on

In the breath between the here and gone ...

Hailed.

OXFORD CHEESE ODE

The ancient poets ne'er did dream

That Canada was land of cream,

They ne'er imagined it could flow

In this cold land of ice and snow,

Where everything did solid freeze,

They ne'er hoped or looked for cheese.

A few years since our Oxford farms

Were nearly robbed of all their charms,

O'er cropped the weary land grew poor

And nearly barren as a moor,

But now their owners live at ease

Rejoicing in their crop of cheese.

And since they justly treat the soil,

Are well rewarded for their toil,

The land enriched by goodly cows

Yields plenty now to fill their mows,

Both wheat and barley, oats and peas,

But still their greatest boast is cheese.

And you must careful fill your mows

With good provender for your cows,

And in the winter keep them warm,

Protect them safe all time from harm,

For cows do dearly love their ease,

Which doth insure best grade of cheese.

To us it is a glorious theme

To sing of milk and curds and cream,

Were it collected it could float

On its bosom, small steam boat,

Cows numerous as swarm of bees

Are milked in Oxford to make cheese.

To prove the wealth that here abounds,

One cheese weighed eight thousand pounds,

Had it been hung in air at noon

Folks would have thought it was the moon,

It sailed with triumph o'er the seas,

'Twas hailed with welcome, queen of cheese.

James McIntyre

Quietly.

FROST at MIDNIGHT

The Frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry

Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

Have left me to that solitude, which suits

Abstruser musings: save that at my side

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs

And vexes meditation with its strange

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,

With all the numberless goings-on of life,

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, every where

Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

And makes a toy of Thought.

                      But O! how oft,

How oft, at school, with most believing mind,

Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,

To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft

With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,

Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear

Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!

And so I brooded all the following morn,

Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,

For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

         Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the intersperséd vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes! For I was reared

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

         Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Happy Birthday, Corradini

Corradini, Veiled Truth, 1752

Antonio Corradini was born on this day in 1688.

Thank you, Dr, Richardson.

Meditate.

Trumbull, Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, 1788

On this day in 1781, British troops commanded by Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, signalling the end of the American Revolution.

The Architect of the Capitol explains John Trumbull's painting ...

Surrender of Lord Cornwallis in the Capitol Rotunda is one of two paintings that artist John Trumbull completed on this subject. He painted this version between 1819 and 1820, basing it upon a small painting (approximately 20 inches by 30 inches) that he had first envisioned in 1785, when he began to “meditate seriously the subjects of national history, of events of the Revolution.”