QUOTATIONS WANTED.
(Vol. ix., pp. 247, 301.)
"The knights are dust,
Their good swords are rust,
Their souls are with the saints, we trust."
This seems to be an imperfect recollection of the concluding lines of a short poem by Coleridge, entitled "The Knight's Tomb." (See Poems of S. T. Coleridge: Moxon, 1852, p. 306.)
The correct reading is as follows:
"The knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust."
G. Taylor.
Your correspondent's mutilated version I have seen on a china match-box, in the shape of a Crusader's tomb.
C. Mansfield Ingleby.
"Of whose omniscient and all-spreading love."
These lines are also Coleridge's (Poems, &c., p. 30., edit. 1852). He afterwards added the following note on this passage:
"I utterly recant the sentiment contained in the lines—
Of whose omniscient and all-spreading love
Aught to implore were impotence of mind;
it being written in Scripture, 'Ask, and it shall be given you!' and my human reason being, moreover, convinced of the propriety of offering petitions, as well as thanksgivings, to Deity.—S. T. C., 1797."
H. G. T.
Weston-super-Mare.
The line quoted (p. 247.) as having been applied by Twining to Pope's Homer, is from Tibullus, iii. 6. 56.
P. J. F. Gantillon
"A fellow feeling makes us wond'rous kind,"
is to be found in the epilogue written and spoken by Garrick on quitting the stage, 1776.[[2]]
A parallel passage appears in Troilus and Cressida, Act III. Sc. 3.:
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
Newburiensis.
The following lines, and the accompanying paraphrase, probably those inquired after by X. Y., are in Davison's Poems, or a Poetical Rhapsody (p. 50., 4th impression, 1621), where they form the third "device." I do not know who the writer was.
"Quid plumâ lævius? Pulvis. Quid pulvere? Ventus.
Quid vento? Mulier. Quid muliere? Nihil."
"Dust is lighter than a feather,
And the wind more light than either;
But a woman's fickle mind
More than a feather, dust, or wind."
F. E. E.
The lines quoted by L. are the first two (a little altered) in the opening stanza of a ballad entitled The Berkshire Lady. The correct version (I speak on the authority of a copy which I procured nearly thirty years ago in the great ballad-mart of those days, the Seven Dials) is,—
"Bachelors of every station,
Mark this strange but true relation,
Which in brief to you I bring;
Never was a stranger thing."
The ballad is an account of "love at first sight," inspired in the breast of a young lady, wealthy and beautiful of course, but who, disdaining such adventitious aids, achieves at the sword's point, and covered with a mask, her marriage with the object of her passion. It is much too long, and not of sufficient merit, for insertion in "N. & Q."
F. E. E.
Footnote 2:[(return)]
[See "N. & Q.," Vol. iii., p. 300.]