Tilting.

Grimshaw, The Spirit of the Night, 1879

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

Ray Bradbury, from Dandelion Wine

Responsible.

Grimshaw, Eveleigh, Forge Valley, 1877

Read a great deal. You can’t learn to write unless you are well-read. Like I say to poets; You are responsible for reading all the world’s poetry because how else will you learn to be a poet? Just like a novelist, you must read the best novels of all.  People should get out and travel at random everywhere. I don’t see the point of sitting around campus like a full can of worms all stuck together.

Jim Harrison

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. 

Walter Lippmann

Smelt.

Grimshaw, Twilight, The Vegetable Garden, 1869

It was autumn, when there were no debates to vex the evening air; and I remember how the leaves smelt like our garden at Blunderstone as we trod them under foot, and how the old, unhappy feeling, seemed to go by, on the sighing wind.

Charles Dickens, from David Copperfield

Know.

Grimshaw, Thro' the Woods, 1873

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Wendell Berry

Nether.

Grimshaw, Woman on a Path by a Cottage, 1882

Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

Charles Dickens, from Bleak House

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

John Ruskin

November.

 Grimshaw, A Yorkshire Lane in November, 1873

Choirs.

Grimshaw, Late October, 1882

SONNET 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

William Shakespeare

Joy.

Grimshaw, Roundhay Lake, Leeds, 1893

IN MEMORY of a HAPPY DAY in FEBRUARY

Blessed be Thou for all the joy

 My soul has felt today!

O let its memory stay with me

 And never pass away!

I was alone, for those I loved

 Were far away from me,

The sun shone on the withered grass,

 The wind blew fresh and free.

Was it the smile of early spring

 That made my bosom glow?

'Twas sweet, but neither sun nor wind

 Could raise my spirit so.

Was it some feeling of delight,

 All vague and undefined?

No, 'twas a rapture deep and strong,

 Expanding in the mind!

Was it a sanguine view of life

 And all its transient bliss–

A hope of bright prosperity?

 O no, it was not this!

It was a glimpse of truth divine

 Unto my spirit given

Illumined by a ray of light

 That shone direct from heaven!

I felt there was a God on high

 By whom all things were made.

I saw His wisdom and his power

 In all his works displayed.

But most throughout the moral world

 I saw his glory shine;

I saw His wisdom infinite,

 His mercy all divine.

Deep secrets of his providence

 In darkness long concealed

Unto the vision of my soul

 Were graciously revealed.

But while I wondered and adored

 His wisdom so divine,

I did not tremble at his power,

 I felt that God was mine.

I knew that my Redeemer lived,

 I did not fear to die;

Full sure that I should rise again

 To immortality.

I longed to view that bliss divine

 Which eye hath never seen,

Like Moses, I would see His face

Without the veil between.

Anne Brontë

Best.

Grimshaw, Wintry Moon, 1886

... early morning, when contemplation is best.

Van Morrison

Amplified.

Grimshaw, A Moonlit Walk, 1873

The SUDDEN WALK

In the evening, when you seem to have definitely resolved to stay home, have put on your housecoat, are sitting at a lighted table after dinner and have undertaken some type of worker game, after the completion of which you usually go to sleep; when there is unfriendly weather outside which makes staying home a foregone conclusion; when you have already been sitting at the table so long that to go out would cause general astonishment; when additionally the stairwell is dark and the front door locked; and when despite all this you stand up in a moment of sudden discomfort, change your coat, immediately appear dressed for the street, explain that you must go out, and after a short goodbye, actually do it, believing, depending on the haste with which you slam the apartment door, to have left more or less anger behind you; when you find yourself on the street again, with limbs that respond with special mobility to the unexpected freedom you have obtained for them; when through this one decision you feel all ability to decide gathered in you; when you recognize with greater than accustomed significance that you have more power than you need to bring about the most rapid change easily and to bear it; and when you walk into the long streets this way — then you have completely stepped out of your family for the evening, and they dissolve into non-existence, while you yourself, thoroughly strong, outlined in black, slapping the back of your thigh, raise yourself to your true form.

Everything is amplified even further when you visit a friend at this time of night to see how he is doing.

Franz Kafka

Morning.

Grimshaw, Old Hall, Cheshire, Early Morning, October, 1880

Countenance.

Grimshaw, Moonlight, Wharfedale, 1865

Path in the garden, deep as a long drink,
gently in soft branches gathering force and then gone.
Oh and the moon, the moon, the benches almost
blooming from its slow approach.

The silence, how it throngs. Are you awake up there?
Starry and full of feeling the window faces you.
Hands of the wind transpose to your near countenance

the remotest night.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Praise.

Grimshaw, A Yorkshire Lane in November, 1873

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost