The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Henry van Dyke wrote this for the sundial at Katrina Trask’s community retreat at Yaddo, New York.
Katrina Trask founded, funded and following a heart attack in 1913 lived at Yaddo, the artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York — her late husband, Spencer Trask, had been a Wall Street banker. One of her friends was Henry van Dyke, a professor of English literature at Princeton from 1899 to 1923, who wrote these lines for her sundial.
Plutarch argues that it when it comes to strong speech, less is always more.
Plutarch has been discussing at length (the incongruity has to be passed over) the annoyance of people who talk too much. The insatiable prattlers, he says, should consider how we admire men of few words; and he gave some examples, from the Spartans, who rebuffed Philip of Macedon, to the god Apollo, who would rather be obscure than wordy.
Solomon recommends taking lessons from one of God’s smallest but most hard-working creatures.
The Book of Proverbs is traditionally ascribed to Solomon, son of King David, and himself King of Israel early in the tenth century BC, though as with the Psalms some of it was compiled from the works of other authors, and some is of later date. The following passage was translated into English for the Authorized Version of 1611, and the result is quite masterly.
Richard Cobden called on Parliament to support small, family-owned farms.
In 1864, Richard Cobden MP published an open letter arguing that small-holdings owned by the farmer, with the absolute right of inheritance, were the best guarantee of public morality and national prosperity. He began with the claim of public morality, arguing that the Government’s policy of super-farms was a step back towards feudalism, and a blow to aspiration.
Lewis Carroll records a suburban photoshoot in the style of Longfellow.
The distinctive rhythm and tricks of speech that Henry Longfellow used in his narrative poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) were just begging to be parodied. Lewis Carroll could not resist the temptation, nor could he resist descending from the lofty tale of a Native American warrior to suburban photography, in which Carroll was an early pioneer.