From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

"A little touch of something like pride is seated in the true sense of a man's own greatness, without which his humility and modesty would be contemptible virtues."
"It is a vain and insipid thing to suffer without loving God or man. Love is a transcendent excellence in every duty, and must of necessity enter into the nature of every grace and virtue. That which maketh the solid benefit of patience unknown, its taste so bitter and comfortless to men, is its death in the separation and absence of its soul. We suffer but love not."
"All things do first receive that give:
Only 'tis God above
That from and in Himself doth live;
Whose all-sufficient love
Without original can flow,
And all the joys and glories show
Which mortal man can take delight to know.
He is the primitive, eternal Spring,
The endless Ocean of each glorious thing.
The soul a vessel is,
A spacious bosom, to contain
All the fair treasures of His bliss,
Which run like rivers from, into, the main,
And all it doth receive, return again."
"You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars."

[1] Early editions of Goldsmith's poem bore the title, The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society. Later editions dropped the sub-title.

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APRIL.

"Thus, then, live I
Till 'mid all the gloom
By Heaven! the bold sun
Is with me in the room
Shining, shining!
"Then the clouds part,
Swallows soaring between;
The spring is alive
And the meadows are green!
"I jump up like mad,
Break the old pipe in twain,
And away to the meadows,
The meadows again!"

The poem of FitzGerald's from which these verses come was known, I believe, to very few until Mr. E. V. Lucas exhumed it from Half-hours with the Worst Authors, and reprinted it in that delightful little book The Open Road. I have a notion that even FitzGerald's most learned executor was but dimly aware of its existence. For my part, at this time of the day, I prefer it to his Omar Khayyàm—perversely, no doubt. In the year 1885 or thereabouts Omar, known only to a few, was a wonder and a treasure to last one's lifetime; but I confess that since a club took him up and feasted his memory with field-marshals and other irrelevant persons in the chair, and since his fame has become vulgarised not only in Thames-side hotels, but over the length and breadth of the North American continent, one at least of his admirers has suffered a not unnatural revulsion, until now he can scarcely endure to read the immortal quatrains. Immortal they are, no doubt, and deserve to be by reason of their style—"fame's great antiseptic." But their philosophy is thin after all, and will not bear discussion. As exercise for a grown man's thought, I will back a lyric of Blake's or Wordsworth's, or a page of Ibsen's Peer Gynt against the whole of it, any day.

This, however, is parenthetical. I caught hold of FitzGerald's verses to express that jollity which should be every man's who looks up from much reading or writing and knows that Spring has come.

"Solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris et favoni
Trahuntque siccas machinæ carinas…"