Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
A poem of nostalgia for the sea breezes and yellow gorse of Northumberland.
War-poet Wilfrid Gibson never served abroad, and was in fact accepted for the army only at his fifth application, in 1917. These short verses do not come from his war-themed collections (though many reflect that subject) but from a set remembering Northumberland, the county of his birth in Hexham.
A meditation on our instinctive love for the place in which we live.
This is just part of a rather longer poem in which Kipling explores the fundamental truth that no mere human can really love everyone and everything equally. That, he says, is why it is both necessary and right that we feel particularly bound to, and responsible for, the place we call home.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden pleaded for Britain to set the world an example as a nation open for business.
Richard Cobden MP urged Queen Victoria’s Parliament to embrace a policy of global free trade, instead of the over-regulated, over-taxed trade deals brokered by politicians and their friends behind closed doors. It was, he said, nothing less than the next step in Britain’s destiny, and her Christian duty.
Jane Eyre meets a not very handsome stranger, and likes him all the better for it.
On a dark road near Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre has caused a stranger’s horse to shy and throw its rider, a big, frowning and far from good-looking man. He brushes her offers of help away, but she hangs around all the same, prompting her to wonder why she feels so comfortable with this gruff traveller.