William Shakespeare, Othello, Ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, Arden Shakespeare, Third Edition, London, 1997.

Horribly stuffed with epithets of war,
(Iago, 1.1.13)



For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In complement extern, ’tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

(Iago, 1.1.60-64)


Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe!...

(Iago, 1.1.87-88)


…she shunned
The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation,

(Brabantio, 1.2.67-8)


She loved me for the dangers I had passed
And I loved her that she did pity them.

(Othello, 1.3.168-9)


…if I be left behind,
A moth to peace, and he go to the war,

(Desdemona, 1.3.256-7)


Roderigo: What should I do? I confess it is my shame to be so fond, but it is not in my virtue to amend it.
Iago: Virtue? a fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus.

(1.3.318-321)


…either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry…

(Iago, 1.3.324-5)


Iago: …we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts; whereof I take this, that you call love, to be a sect or scion.
Roderigo: It cannot be.
Iago: It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man! drown thyself? drown cats and blind puppies.

(1.3.330-336)

If thou canst cuckold him, thou dost thyself a pleasure, me a sport.

(Iago, 1.3.369-370)


The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,

(Iago, 1.3.398-399)


O, gentle lady, do not put me to’t,
For I am nothing if not critical.

(Iago, 2.1.118-119; put me to’t : challenge me to do it)


2.1.148-60: Here Iago plays the fool to mask his true character, as in 2.3.64, and to show off his cleverness. (note, 172) [Iago also acts like a jackass to drive Cassio and Desdemona together]


To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer.

(Iago, 2.1.160)


…ay, well said, whisper.

(Iago, 2.1.167-168)


For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl;

(Othello, 2.3.168)


…What’s the matter
That you unlace your reputation thus
And spend your rich opinion for the name
Of a night-brawler?...

(Othello, 2.3.189-192)


I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear:

(Iago, 2.3.351)


…but he protests he loves you
And needs no other suitor but his likings

(Emilia, 3.1.49-51)


Though I am bound to every act of duty
I am not bound to that all slaves are free to—
Utter my thoughts?...

(Iago, 3.3.137-138; I am not bound to that [what] all slaves are free to [not bound to do])


Look where he comes. Not poppy nor mandragora
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.

(Iago, 3.3.333-336)


I think my wife be honest, and think she is not,
I think that thou art just, and think thou art not.

(Iago, 3.3.387-388)


’Tis not a year or two shows us a man.
They are all but stomachs, and we all but food:
They eat us hungerly, and when they are full
They belch us.

(Iago, 3.4.104-107)


…’tis a venial slip;

(Iago, 4.1.9)


Was this fair paper, this most goodly book
Made to write ‘whore’ upon? …

(Othello, 4.2.72-3)


…thy light relume: …

(Othello, 5.2.13)


Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.
From this time forth I never will speak word.

(Iago, 5.2.300-301)

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1851. Penguin Books, New York, 1992.




Once more. Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and yen to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There’s magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infalliably lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. (4)



I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at ease meantime—to see what was next to follow. First he takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawls of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such sort of fate at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed or other, druing which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carefully as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock. (25)



…after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of seadogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas— (34)



We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare. (34-5)



In the same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody fisherman, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not. (39)



…when the wind is shieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah’s head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, (51)



And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay his down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly know to me by Thy rob—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?” (54)



Queequeg… But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth page—as I fancies—stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited. (55)



…that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records. (66)



Captain Bildad… strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism… Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. … Now Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-colored eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished from before him. (83)



I say, we good Presbyterian Christians… (90)



“Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.

“Going aboard?”

“Hands off, will you,” said I.

“Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ’way!”

“Aint going aboard, then?”

“Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?”

“No, no, no; I wasn’t aware of that,” said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking fromme to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.

“Elijah,” said I, “you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained.”

“Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?” (107)



Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unresistingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Worderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis! (116-7) [narrative hokiness, some cognitive sophistication, and lots of talent at fulmination]



But this is not the half; look again. (119)



In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be blameworthy? (123) [awk rhythms of speech]



…thou great democratic God! … Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! … Thou who… ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; (127) [leaves out aristocratic Washington and Jefferson.]



It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. (135)



But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! (160)



It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of sea-urges, that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that same commander’s cabin, and straightaway their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the table; this is marvelous, sometimes most comical. (162) [awk. Unfinished subjunctive]



It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country gentleman, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden. (174) [space vacated by monarchy]



“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks the shall. Twill soon be out.” (174)



“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow.” (178)



“… But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! … (178) [Ahab]



“ … That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. (178) [Ahab]



“… Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! (178) [Ahab]



“… The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricant, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! (178-9) [Ahab]



“Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short draughts—long swallows, men; ’tis hot as Satan’s hoofs. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out as the serpent-snapping eye. well done; almost drained. That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me—here’s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill! (179-80)



Didain the task? (180) [Ahab]



We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light,

To loves as gay and fleeting

As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,

And break on the lips while meeting. (186)



For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; (195)



All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. (200)



…his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. (201)



This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. (201) [narrative. Tell rather than show.]



It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. (204)



As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any other funereal music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin. (206)



It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appalls the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; … And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog— (208)



…and there is a higher horror in this whiteness… (210)



Tell me, why this strong young cold, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, … No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knos it that bledge of the demonism in the world. … Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt! … Thou in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible sphere were formed in fright. (211)



Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, … the visible absence of color, … a colorless, all-color of atheism form which we shrink? (212) [all colors/all gods = no god]



…the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, … (215)



…the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; (221) [Ishmael: meta-narrative or folksy artlessness]



I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and form these citations, I take it—the conclusions aimed at will naturally follow of itself. (221)



Yet I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many others, we spoke to thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it. (224)



Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, (256)



Americans and English… the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be had to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. (261)



…the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record. / For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, (266)



For all these reasons, then, any way you look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan. (289) [Wittgenstein vs. uninspired writing & uninspired sentiment; or is this playful post-modernism]



Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying out eternal war since the world began. /

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! (299) [soul vs. Bulkington’s truth, earlier noted; also, ingenious and unexpected turn in that second paragraph]



The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance and all swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulating there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life. /

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sank, with a wild voice exclaimed—“Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”

“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.

“The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.”

But Ahab said nothing; turning to his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest as silently following. (301)



With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line. (303) [should be in the director’s commentary on the DVD]



“Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, “don’t you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been beating this steak too much, cook; it’s too tender. Don’t I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? (320)



That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it. (325) [sloppy ending]



In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. (349) [smart meta-narrative?]



…so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it. (411)

…small detached bands are occasionally observed, embracing form twenty to fifty individuals each. Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated. /

In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more than one third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point. (428)



The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad a Yale or Harvard. (431)



…a tribe, which ever enjoys all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. (450)



…though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweler would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story. (451) [strange, great]



It had cooled and crystalized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! Such a sweetener! Such a softener! Such a delicious mollifier! After having myhands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize. /

As I sat there at my east, cross-legged on the deck; after bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,--literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill—will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever./

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that as last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. (455-6)



Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! … believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler; [464] … that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This willful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; ... [is not true] … Give not thyself up, then, to the fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it di me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. (465)



…thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. (506)



For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. (506) [Satanic blasphemy, by the way; pride where humility of salvation should be]



To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless priogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers. (506) [Achilles]



…as touching all Ahab’s deeper par, every revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore… [506] through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod’s decks. (507)



Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; (508) [tacky]



…when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; (534)



And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—

“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.” (535)



But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. (592)



Ahab is for ever, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.— (611)

Thomas Carew, Poems of Thomas Carew

Thomas Carew, Poems of Thomas Carew, Ed. Arthur Vincent, Ayer Company Publishers, Inc., North Stratford, NH, (Reprint 2000, of 1899 Edition)

Most fleeting, when it is most dear,
’Tis gone, while we but say ’tis here.

(Persuasions to Love, 3)


Spend not in vain your life’s short hour,
But crop in time your beauty’s flower,

(Persuasions to Love, 4)


So grieves th’advent’rous merchant, when he throws
All the long toil’d-for treasure his ship stows
Into the angry main, to save from wrack
Himself and men, as I grieve to give back
These letters: yet so powerful is your sway
As if you bid me die, I must obey.

(My Mistress Commanding Me to Return Her Letters, 10)


Looking into her mind, I might survey
An host of beauties, that in ambush lay,

[not smoothe] (My Mistress Commanding Me to Return Her Letters, 11)


No eye shall see, nor yet the sun
Descry, what thou and I have done.

(Secrecy Protested, 13)


Go, thou gentle whispering wind,
Bear this sigh, and if thou find
Where my cruel fair doth rest
Cast it in her snowy breast,
So, inflamed by my desire,
It may set her heart afire.
Those sweet kisses thou shalt gain,
Will reward thee for thy pain;
Boldly light upon her lip,
There suck odours, and thence skip
To her bosom; lastly fall
Down, and wander over all.
Range about those ivory hills,
Form whose every part distills
Amber dew; there spices grow,
There pure streams of nectar flow;
There perfume thyself, and bring
All those sweets upon thy wing.
As thou return’st, change by thy power
Every weed into a flower;
Turn each thistle to a vine,
Make the bramble eglantine;
For so rich a booty made,
Do but this, and I am paid.
Thou can’st with thy powerful blast
Heat apace, and cool as fast;
Thou can’st kindle hidden flame,
And again destroy the same:
Then, for pity, either stir
Up the fire of love in her,
That alike both flames may shine,
Or else quite extinguish mine.

(A Prayer to the Wind, Complete, 14-15)


Then crown my joys or cure my pain:
Give me more love or more disdain.

(Song. Mediocrity in Love Rejected, 16)


Oh, do not think it new idolatry;
…
But what can heaven to her glory add?
The praises she hath dead, living she had;
To day she’s now an angel is no more
Praise than she had, for she was one before.
Which of the saints can show more votaries
Than she had here? Even those that did despise
The angels, and may her, now she is one,
Did, whilst she lived, with pure devotion
Adore and worship her: her virtues had
All honour here, …

(An Elegy on the La: Pen: Sent to my Mistress Out of France, 27-8)


Fair copy of my Celia’s face,
Twin of my soul, thy perfect grace
Claims in my love an equal place.
/
Disdain not a divided heart,
Though all be hers, you shall have part:
Love is not tied to rules of art.
/
For as my soul first to her flew,
Yet stay’d with me, so now ’tis true
It dwells with her, though fled to you.
/
Then entertain this wand’ring guest,
And if not love, allow it rest:
It left not, but mistook, the nest.
/
Nor think my love, or your fair eyes,
Cheaper, ’cause from sympathies
You hold with her these flames arise.
/
To lead or brass, or some such bad
Metal, a prince’s stamp may add
That value which it never had;
/
But to the pure refined ore
The stamp of kings imparts no more
Worth than the metal held before.
/
Only the image gives the rate
To subjects; in a foreign state
’Tis prized as much for its own weight.
/
So though all other hearts resign
To your pure worth, yet you have mine
Only because you are her coin.

(To T. H., A Lady Resembling My Mistress, Complete, 35)


Though frost and snow lock’d from mine eyes
That beauty which without door lies,
Thy gardens, orchards, walks, that so
I might not all thy pleasures know;
Yet, Saxham, thou within thy gate
Art of thyself so delicate,
So full of native sweets, that bless
Thy roof with inward happiness,
As neither form, nor to thy store
Winter takes aught, or spring adds more.
The cold and frozen air had sterved
Much poor, if not by thee preserved,
Whose prayers have made thy table blest
With plenty, far above the rest.
The season hardly did afford
Coarse cates unto thy neighbours’ board,
Yet thou hast dainties, as the sky
Had only been thy volary;
Or else the birds, fearing the snow
Might to another deluge grow,
The pheasant, partridge, and the lark
Flew to thy house, as to the Artk.
The willing ox of himself came
Home to the slaughter with the lamb,
And every beast did thither bring
Himself, to be an offering.
The scaly herd more pleasure took,
Bathed in thy dish than in the brook;
Water, earth, air, did all conspire
To pay their tributes to thy fire,
Whose cherishing flames themselves divide
Through every room, where they deride
The night and cold abroad; whilst they,
Like suns within, keep endless day.
Those cheerful beams send forth their light
To all that wander in the night,
And seem to beckon from aloof
The weary pilgrim to thy roof,
Where if, refresh’d, he will away,
He’s fairly welcome; or, if stay,
Far more; which he shall hearty find
Both from the master and the hind:
The stranger’s welcome each man there
Stamp’d on his cheerful brow doth wear.
Nor doth this welcome or his cheer
Grow less, ’cause he stays longer here:
There’s none observes, much less repines,
How often this man sups or dines.
Thou hast no porter at thy door
T’examine or keep back the poor;
Nor locks nor bolts: thy gates have bin
Made only to let strangers in;
Untaught to shut, they do not fear
To stand wide open all the year,
Careless who enters, for they know
Thou never didst deserve a foe:
And as for thieves, thy bounty’s such,
They cannot steal, thou giv’st so much.

(To Saxham, Complete, 36-8)


Sir,
Ere you pass this threshold, stay,
And give your creature leave to pay
Those pious rites, which unto you,
As to our household gods, are due.
…
Incense nor gold have we, …
…
The slaughter’d beast, whose flesh should feed
The hungry flames, we for pure need
Dress for your supper; and the gore
Which should be dash’d on every door,
We change into the lusty blood
Of youthful vines, of which a flood
Shall sprightly run through all your veins,
First to your health, then your fair train’s.
…
Such rarities, that come from far,
From poor men’s houses banish’d are:
…
We’ll have whate’er the season yields
Out of the neighbouring woods and fields;
…
And, having supp’d, we may perchance
Present you with a country dance.
…
And beg, besides, you’ld hither bring
Only the mercy of a king,
And not the greatness: since they have
A thousand faults must pardon crave,
But nothing that is fit to wait
Upon the glory of your state.

(To the King, At His Entrance into Saxham, By Master John Crofts, 40-1)


Must fever shake this goodly tree, and all
That ripen’d fruit form the fair branches fall,
Which princes have desired to taste? Must she,
Who hath preserved her spotless chastity
Form all solicitation, now at last
By agues and diseases be embraced?

(Upon the Sickness of E. S., 42)


That health may crown the seasons of this year,
And mirth dance round the circle; that no tear,
Unless of joy, may with its briny dew
Discolour on your cheek the rosy hue;
That no access of years presume to abate
Your beauties’ ever-flourishing estate.
Such cheap and vulgar wishes I could lay
As trivial off’rings at your feet this day,
But that it were apostacy in me
To send a prayer to any deity
But your divine self, who have power to give
Those blessings unto others, such as live
Like me, by the sole influence of your eyes,
Whose fair aspects govern our destinies.

[A wish by what means? She is the source of happiness.] (A New-Year’s Sacrifice, 44)


Then, think not that my heat can die, [poor prosody]
Till you burn as well as I.

(Song. To My Mistress, I Burning in Love, 46)


Now she burns as well as I,
Yet my heat can never die;
…
She burns, she cries, “Love’s fires are mild;
Fevers are God’s; he’s a child.”
Love! let her know the difference
’Twixt the heat of soul and sense:
Touch her with thy flames divine,
So shalt thou quench her fire, and mine.

(Song. To Her Again, She Burning in a Fever, 47)


Sickness, …
…
First it begins upon the womb to wait,
And doth the unborn child there uncreate; [sloppy]

(Upon the King’s Sickness, 48)


Let fools great Cupid’s yoke disdain,
Loving their own wild freedom better;
Whilst, proud of my triumphant chain,
I sit, and court my beauteous fetter.

[un-American] (Song. The Willing Prisoner to his Mistress, 51)


Hide not those panting balls of snow
With envious veils form my beholding;

(Song. The Willing Prisoner to His Mistress, 51)


Seek not to know my love, for she
Hath vow’d her constant faith to me;
Her mild aspects are mine, and thou
Shalt only find a stormy brow:

(Song. To One That Desired to Know My Mistress, 55)


No more, blind god! for see, me heart
Is made thy quiver, where remains
No void place for another dart;
And, alas! that conquest gains
Small praise, that only brings away
A tame and unresisting prey.
/
Behold a noble foe, all arm’d,
Defies thy weak artillery,
That hath thy bow and quiver charm’d,
A rebel beauty, conquering thee:
If thou dar’st equal combat try,
Wound her, for ’tis for her I die.

(Truce in Love Intreated, Complete, 57)


Wherefore do thy sad numbers flow, [poetry]

(Grief Engrossed, 63)


The giant, Honour, that keeps cowards out,
Is but a masque, and the servile rout
Of baser subjects only bend in vain
To the vast idol; whilst the noble train
Of valiant lovers daily sail between
The huge Colossus’ legs, and pass unseen
Unto the blissful shore. …

(A Rapture, 70)


There my enfranchised hand on every side
Shall o’er thy naked polish’d ivory side.
No curtain there, tough of transparent lawn,
Shall be before thy virgin-treasure drawn;

(A Rapture, 71)


Then, as the empty bee that lately bore
Into the common treasure all her store,
Flies ’bout the painted field with nimble wing,
Deflow’ring the fresh virgins of the spring,
So will I rifle all the sweets that dwell
In my delicious paradise, and swell
My bag with honey, drawn forth by the power
Of fervent kisses from each spicy flower.
…
Where I will all those ravish’d sweets distil
Through Love’s alembic, and with chemic skill
From the mix’d mass one soverign balm derive,
Then bring that great elixir to thy hive.

(A Rapture, 72)


My rudder with thy bold hand, like a tried
And skillful pilot, thou shalt steer, and guide
My bark into love’s channel, where it shall
Dance, as the bounding waves do rise or fall.

(A Rapture, 72-3)


And send up holy vapours to those powers
That bless our loves and crown our sportful hours,

(A Rapture, 73)


We seek no midnight arbour, no dark groves
To hide our kisses: there, the hated name
Of husband, wife, lust, modest, chaste or shame,
Are vain and empty words, whose very sound
Was never heart in the Elysian ground.
All things are lawful there, …

(A Rapture, 73)


…tell me why
This goblin Honour, which the world adores,
Should make men atheists, and not women whores?

(A Rapture, 75)


The Lady Mary Villiers lies
Under this stone; with weeping eyes
The parents that first gave her birth,
And their sad friends, laid her in earth.
If any of them, Reader, were
Known unto thee, shed a tear;
Or if thyself possess a gem
As dear to thee, as this to them,
Though a stranger to this place,
Bewail in theirs thine own hard case:
For thou, perhaps, at thy return
Mayst find thy darling in an urn.

(Epitaph on the Lady Mary Villiers, Complete 76)


…She was a cabinet
Where all the choicest stones of price were set:
…
The constant diamond, the wise chrysolite,
The devout sapphire, emerald apt to write
Records of memory, cheerful agate, grave
And serious onyx, topaz that doth save
The brain’s calm temper, witty amethyst,
…
One only pearl was wanting to her store,
Which in her Saviour’s book she found express’d:
To purchase that, she sold Death all the rest.

(Epitaph on the Lady S., Wife of Sir W. S., 78)


Answer. As streams which form their crystal spring
Do sweet and clear their waters bring,
Yet, mingling with the brackish main,
Nor taste nor colour they retain.

(Four Songs, By Way of Chorus to a Play, 84)


Who hath his flock of cackling geese compared
With thy tuned choir of swans? …

(To Ben Jonson, Upon the Occasion of His Ode of Defiance Annexed to His Play of the New Inn, 90)


Thou shalt endure a trial by thy peers;
Virgins of equal birth, of equal years,
Whose virtues held with thine an emulous strife,
Shall draw thy picture, and record thy life.

(Obsequies to the Lady Anne Hay, 95)





Knew how to brandish steel and scatter gold

(Upon the Countess of Anglesey, 98)


…the uncissor’d [long-haired] lecturer, form the flower
Of fading rhetoric, short-lived as his hour [to preach]
Dry as the sand that measures it, [hour glass]

(An Elegy Upon the Death of Dr. Donne, Dean of Paul’s, 100)


The Muses’ garden, with pedantic weeds
O’erspread, was purged by thee; …

(An Elegy Upon the Death of Dr. Donne, Dean of Paul’s, 101)


…to the awe of thy imperious wit
Our troublesome language bends, …

(An Elegy Upon the Death of Dr. Donne, Dean of Paul’s, 101)


And so, whilst I cast on thy funeral pile
Thy crown of bays, oh let it crack awhile,
And spit disdain, till the devouring flashes
Suck all the moisture up, then turn to ashes.

(An Elegy Upon the Death of Dr. Donne, Dean of Paul’s, 103)


Here lies a king that rules, as he thought fit,
The universal monarchy of wit;

(An Elegy Upon the Death of Dr. Donne, Dean of Paul’s, 103)


Believe me, friend, if their prevailing powers
Gain them a calm security like ours,
They’ll hang their arms upon the olive bough,
And dance and reveal then, as we do now.
(In Answer of an Elegialcal Letter, Upon the Death of the King of Sweden form Aurelian Townsend, Inviting Me to Write on That Subject, 107)


Sweetly breathing vernal air,
That with kind warmth dost repair
Winter’s ruins; …
…
Thou, if stormy Boreas throws
Down whole forests when he blwos,
With a pregnant flowery birth
Canst refresh the teeming earth;

(Upon Master W. Montague, His Return from Travel, 108)


For till to-morrow we’ll prorogue this storm;
Which shall confound, with its loud whistling noise,
Her pleasing shrieks, and fan thy panting joys.

(Upon the Marriage of T. K. and C. C. : The Morning Stormy, 112)


Whose perfumes through the ambient air diffuse
Such native aromatics, as we use
No foreign gums, nor essence fetch’d from far,
No volatile spirits, nor compounds that are

[organic motto] (To My Friend G. N., From Wrest, 120)


Where, at large tables fill’d with wholesome meats,
The servant, tenant, and kind neighbour eats.
Some of that rank, spun of a finer thread,
Are with the women, steward, and chaplain, fed
With daintier cates; others of better note,
Whom wealth, parts, office, or the herald’s coat
Have sever’d form the common, freely sit
At the lord’s table, whose spread sides admit
A large access of friends, to fill those seats
Of his capacious circle, fill’d with meats
Of choicest relish, till his oaken back
Under the load of piled up dishes crack.

(To My Friend G. N., From Wrest, 121)


Waters…
Disport and wander freely where they please,

(To My Friend G. N., From Wrest, 122)


Look back, old Janus, …
…
Turn o’er the annals past, and where
Happy auspicious days appear,
Mark’d with the whiter stone, that cast
On the dark brow of th’ ages past
A dazzling lustre, …

(A New Year’s Gift, 124)


Thou great commandress, that dost move
Thy sceptre o’er the crown of Love,

(To the Queen, 125)


Dearest, thy tresses are not threads of gold,
Thy eyes of diamonds, nor do I hold
Thy lips for rubies, …

(The Comparison, 136)


I do not love thee for that belly,
Sleek as satin, soft as jelly;

(The Complement, 138)


Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty’s orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

(A Song, 141)


Give me a wench about thirteen,
Already voted to the queen
Of lust and lovers; …
…
Whose every part doth re-invite
The old decayed appetite;
And in whose sweet embraces I
May melt my self to lust, and die.
This is true bliss, and I confess
There is no other happiness.

[note change in meter in italics. Pedophilia as well.] (A Second Rapture, 142)


O ’tis a life to be so dead!

(A Song, 144)


Sit thee down,
And we will make the gods confess
Mortals enjoy some happiness.

(Love’s Courtship, 149)


Though peace do petty states maintain,
Here war alone makes beauty reign.

(On Mistress N., To the Green Sickness, 156)


Had he not eaten, she perhaps had been
Unpunish’d: his consent made her’s a sin.

[patronizing, funny] (A Married Woman, 160)


Whose priest sung sweetest lays, thou didst appear,
A glorious mystery, so dark, so clear,
As Nature did intend
All should confess, but none might comprehend?

[Romantic] (A Divine Love, 161)


…scattering such loose fires

(A Divine Love, 161)


The good things that I meet, I think streams be,
From you, the fountain; …

(To Celia, Upon Love’s Ubiquity, 169)


I am the dial’s hand, still walking round,
You are the compass: …

(To Celia, Upon Love’s Ubiquity, 169)


And I myself would choose to know it,
First by thy care and cunning not to show it.

(Methodus Amandi, A Dialogue, 175)


Her eye so rich, so pure a grey,
Every beam creates a day:
And, if she but sleep (not when
The sun sets), ’tis night again.

(The Hue and Cry, 180)

Thomas Campion, The Works of Thomas Campion

Thomas Campion, The Works of Thomas Campion, Ed. Walter R. Davis, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York, 1970.

If all would lead their lives in love like mee,
Then bloudie swords and armour should not be,
(My sweetest Lesbia, from A Book of Ayres, 1601, 18)


I care not for these Ladies
That must be woods and praide,
Give me kind Amarillis
The wanton country maide;
Nature art disdaineth,
Her beauty is her owne;
Who when we court and kisse,
She cries, forsooth, let go:
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say no.

(I care not for these Ladies, from A Book of Ayres, 1601, 22)


When to her lute Corrina sings,
Her voice revives the leaden stringes,
And doth in ighest noates appeare
As any challeng’d echo cleere;
But when she doth of mourning speake,
Ev’n with her sighes the strings do breake.
/
And, as her lute doth live or die,
Led by her passion, so must I:
For when of pleasure she doth sing,
My thoughts enjoy a sodaine spring;
But if she doth of sorrow speake,
Ev’n from my hart the strings doe breake.

(When to her lute, from A Book of Ayres, 1601, 28; lute strings made from gut; challeng’d = aroused)


Thou art not faire, for all thy red and white,
For all those rosie ornaments in thee;
Thou art not sweet, though made of meer delight,
Nor faire nor sweet, unless thou pitie mee.

(Thou are not faire, from A Book of Ayres, 1601, 34)


The man of life upright,
…
The man whose silent dayes
In harmless joys are spent,
…
Hee only can behold
With unafrighted eyes
The horrours of the deepe,
And terrours of the Skies.
…
Good thoughts his onely friendes,
His wealth a well-spent age,
The earth his sober Inine,
And quiet Pilgrimage.

(The man of life upright, from A Book of Ayres, 1601, 43)


Sing thy joy with thankes, and so thy sorrow:

(Tune thy Musicke to thy hart, from Two Bookes of Ayres; The First Contayning Divine and Morall Songs: The Second, Light Conceits of Lovers, 66)


Lighten, heavy hart, thy spright,
The joys recall that thence are fled;
Yeeld thy brest some living light:

(Lighten, heavy hart, thy spright, from Two Bookes of Ayres; The First Contayning Divine and Morall Songs: The Second, Light Conceits of Lovers, 79)


Her grace I sought, her love I wooed;
Her love though I obtaine,
No time, no toyle, now vow, no faith
Her wished grace can gaine.

[grace = sexual favors] (Where shee her sacred bowre adornes, from Two Bookes of Ayres; The First Contayning Divine and Morall Songs: The Second, Light Conceits of Lovers, 91)


Women, courted, have the hand
To discard what they distaste:

(Faine would I my love disclose, from Two Bookes of Ayres; The First Contayning Divine and Morall Songs: The Second, Light Conceits of Lovers, 92)


Young am I, and farre from guile;
The more is my woe the while:

(Good men, shew, if you can tell, from Two Bookes of Ayres; The First Contayning Divine and Morall Songs: The Second, Light Conceits of Lovers, 95)


As if the world were borne anew
To gratifie the Spring.

(The peacefull westerne winde, from Two Bookes of Ayres; The First Contayning Divine and Morall Songs: The Second, Light Conceits of Lovers, 100)


My churle vowes no man shall sent [scent] his sweet Rose:

(A secret love or two, I must confesse, from Two Bookes of Ayres; The First Contayning Divine and Morall Songs: The Second, Light Conceits of Lovers, 111)

Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (1594-1612) held for his time some of the peculiar fascination that Sir Philip Sidney had held for the previous generation—much increased, of course, by the promise of his eventual kingship. … He combined great personal charm with a rather fervent religious nature, learning toward the kind of strict Protestant position represented by his favorite divine and chaplain Joseph Hall, and taking a far more active interest in the European Protestant cause than his father ever had… For these reasons he viewed coldly prospective French and Spanish marriages for himself and welcomed with you the match of his sister Elizabeth with Frederic, … He died on November 6, 1612, of typhoid fever aggravated by overindulgence in exercise. (114)

(And like a well tun’d chime his carriage was
Full of coelestiall witchcraft, winning all
To admiration and love personal.

(An Elegie upon the untimely death of Prince Henry, 117)


In harmony hee spake, and trod the ground
In more proportion then the measur’d sound.

(An Elegie upon the untimely death of Prince Henry, 117)


Be thou then my beauty named,
Since thy will is to be mine:
For by that am I enflamed,
Which on all alike doth shine.
Others may the light admire,
I onely truly feele the fire.
/
But, if lofty titles move thee,
Challenge then a Sov’raignes place:
Say I honour when I love thee,
Let me call thy kindnesse grace.
State and Love things divers bee,
Yet will we teach them to agree.
/
Or, if this be not sufficing,
Be thou stil’d my Goddesse then:
I will love thee sacrificing,
In thine honour Hymnes Ile pen.
To be thine, what canst thou more?
Ile love thee, serve thee, and adore.

(Be thou then my beauty named, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 155)


Sleepe, angry beauty, sleep, and feare not me,
For who a sleeping Lyon dares provoke?
It shall suffice me here to sit and see
Those lips shut up that never kindely spoke.

(Sleepe angry beauty, sleep and feare not me, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 161)


Yet, be just and constant still; Love may beget a wonder,
Not unlike a Summers frost, or Winters fatall thunder:

(Silly boy, ’tis ful Moone yet, thy night as day shines clearly, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 162)


’Tis childish to be caught with Pearle, or Amber,
And woman-like too much to cloy [crowd] the charmer;
Youth should the Field affect, heate their rough Steedes,
Their hardness nerves to fit for better deedes.

(Thou joyst, fond boy, to be by many loved, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 170)


To his sweet Lute Apollo sung the motions of the Spheares,
The wondrous order of the Stars, whose course divides the yeares,
And all the Mysteries above:
But none of this could Midas move,
Which purchast him his Asses eares.
/
Then Pan with his rude Pipe began the Country-wealth t’advance,
To boast of Cattle, flockes of Sheepe, and Goates on hils that dance,
With much more of this churlish kinde:
That quite transported Midas minde,
And held him rapt as in a trance.
/
This wrong the God of Musicke scorn’d form such a sottish Judge,
And bent his angry bow at Pan, which made the Piper trudge:
Then Midas head he so did trim
That ev’ry age yet talks of him
And Phoebus right revenged grudge.

(To his sweet Lute Apollo sung the motions of the Spheare, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 176)


Yet nor Churle, nor silken Gull
Shall my Mayden blossom pull:
Who shall not I soone can tell;
Who shall, wouldi could as well:
This I know, who ere hee be,
Love hee must, or flatter me.

(Young and simple though I am, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 177)


O Love…
Be just, and strike him, to, that dares contemne thee so.
…
O then we both will sit in some unhaunted shade,
And heale each others wound which Love hath justly made:

(O Love, where are thy Shafts, thy Quiver, and thy Bow? The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 180)


Learne to speake first, then to wooe: to wooing much pertayneth:
Hee that courts us, wanting Arte, soone falters when he fayneth,

(Think’st thou to seduce me then with words that have no meaning? The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 186)


Turne all thy thoughts to eyes,
Turne all thy haires to eares,
Change all thy friends to spies,
And all thy joys to feares:
True Love will yet be free,
In spite of Jealousie.
/
Turne darknesse into day,
Conjectures into truth,
Beleeve what th’ envious say,
Let age interpret youth:
True love will yet be free,
In spite of Jealousie.
/
Wrest every word and looke,
Racke ev’ry hidden thought,
Or fish with golden hooke,
True love cannot be caught:
For that will still be free,
In spite of Jealousie.

(Turne all thy thoughts to eyes, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 188)


Beauty, since you so much desire
To know the place of Cupids fire:
About you somewhere doth it rest,
Yet never harbour’d in your brest,
Nor gout-like in your heele or toe;
What foole would seeke Loves flame so low?
But a little high, but a little higher,
There, there, o there lyes Cupids fire.
/
Thinke not, when Cupid most you scorne,
Men judge that you of Ice were borne;
For, though you cast love at your heele,
His fury yet sometime you feele;
And wherer-abouts if you would know,
I tell you still, not in your toe:
But a little high, but a little higher,
There, there, o there lyes Cupids fire.

(Beauty, since you so much desire, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 190)


Here is a grove secur’d with shade;
O then be wise, and flye not.
/
Harke, the Birds delighted sing,
Yet our pleasure sleepes.

(Your faire looks urge my desire, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, 192)

Roger Ascham, Toxophilus

Roger Ascham, Toxophilus; The School of Shooting, History of Archery Series, Reprint, No Date.

What time as, most Gracious Prince, your Highness, this last year past, took that your most honourable and victorious journey into France, accompanied with such a port of the Nobility and Yeomanry of England, as neither hath been known by experience, nor yet read of in history: accompanied also with the daily prayers, good hearts, and wills, of all and every one of your Grace’s subjects left behind you here at home in England; the same time, I being at my book in Cambridge, sorry that my little ability could stretch our no better to help forward so noble an enterprise, yet with my good will, prayer, and heart, nothing behind him that was foremost of all, conceived a wonderful desire, by the prayer, wishing, talking, and communication, that was in every man’s mouth, for your Grace’s most victorious return, to offer up something, at your home-coming, to your Highness, which should both be a token of my love and duty toward your Majesty, and also a sign of my good mind and zeal toward my country. (Dedication, 1-2)

In our fathers’ time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry. If any man suppose they were good enough to pass the time withal, he is deceived. (To All Gentlemen and Yeoman of England, 7)

Yet in writing this book, some men will marvel perchance, while that I, being an unperfect shooter, should take in hand to write of making a perfect archer: the same man, peradventure, will marvel how a whetstone, which is blunt, can make the edge of a knife sharp. (9)

Philologus: …we physicians say, that it is neither good for the eyes in so clear a sun, nor yet wholesome for the body so soon after meat, to look upon a man’s book. (Toxophilus, The First Book of the School of Shooting, 11)

Philologus: …wholesome, honest, and mannerly pastimes… (13)

Philologus: …this I am sure, which thing this fair wheat [metaphor; not apropos of farming] (God save it) maketh me remember, that those husbandmen which rise earliest and come latest home, and are content to have their dinner and other drinkings brought into the field to them for fear of losing of time, have fatter barns in harvest, than they which will either sleep at noon-time of the day, or else make merry with their neighbours at the ale. (13)

Toxophilus: …to omit study some time of the day and some time of the year, made as much for the increase of learning as to let the land lie some time fallow, maketh for the better increase of corn. This we see, if the land be ploughed every year, is small, and, when it is brought into the barn and threshed, giveth very evil fall [fall= produce] (14)

Toxophilus: For a man’s wit sore occupied in earnest study must be as well recreated with some honesty pastime, as the body sore labored must be refreshed with sleep and quietness, (15)

Philologus: …I marvel how it chanceth then that… (16)

Philologus: Indeed you praise shooting very well, in that you show that Domitian and Commodus love shooting; such an ungracious couple, I am sure, as a man shall not find again, if he raked all hell for them. (20)

Toxophilus: … the Persians, which under Cyrus conquered, in a manner, all the world, had a law that their children should learn three things only from five years old unto twenty; to ride an horse well, to shoot well, to speak truth always and never lie. (21)

Toxophilus: …and the labour which is in shooting of all other is best, both because it increaseth strength and preserveth health most, being not vehement but moderate, not overlaying any one part with weariness, but softly exercising every part with equalness, as the arms and breasts with drawing, the other parts with going, being not so painful for the labour as pleasant for the pastime, which exercise, by the judgment of the best physicians, is most allowable. (22) [italics mine]

Toxophilus: Moreover, that shooting of all other is the most honest pastime, and hath least occasion to naughtiness joined with it, two things very plainly do prove, which be, as a man would say, the tutors and oversees to shooting: day-light, and open place where every man doth come, the maintainers and keepers of shooting from all unhonest doing. (23)

Toxophilus: …Plato and Aristotle both, in their books entreating of the commonwealth, where they show how youth should be brought up in four things, in reading, in writing, in exercise of body, and singing, do make mention of music and all kinds of it; wherein they both agree, that music used among the Lydians is very ill for young men which be students for virtue and learning, for a certain nice, soft, and smooth sweetness of it, which would rather entice them to naughtiness than stir them to honesty. /
Another kind of music, invented by the Dorians, they both wonderfully praise, allowing it to be very fit for the study of virtue and learning, because of a manly, rough, and stout sound in it, which should encourage young stomachs to attempt manly matters. … this I am sure, that lutes, harps, all manner of pipes, barbitons, sambukes, with other instruments every one, which standeth by fine and quick fingering, be condemned of Aristotle, as not to be brought in and used among them which study for learning and virtue. /
Pallas, when she had invented the pipe, cast it away; not so much, saith Aristotle, because it deformed her face, but much rather because such an instrument belongeth nothing to learning. … methink, by reason it doth as honey doth to a man’s stomach, which at the first receiveth it well, but afterward it maketh it unfit to abide any good strong nourishing meat, or else any wholesome sharp and quick drink. And even so in a manner these instruments make a man’s wit so soft… (27)

Toxophilus: Therefore either Aristotle and Plato know not what was good and evil for learning and virtue, and the example of wise histories be vainly set afore us, or else the minstrelsy of lutes, pipes, harps, and all other that standeth by such nice, fine, minikin fingering, (such as the most part of scholars whom I know use, if they use any,) is far more fit, for the womanishness of it, to dwell in the Court among ladies, than for any great thing in it, which should help good and sad study, to abide in the University among scholars. (28)

Philologus: …praising God, by singing in the church, needeth not my praise, seeing it is so praise through all the scripture; therefore now I will speak nothing of it, rather than I should speak too little of it. (29)

Toxophilus: In study every part of the body is idle, which things causeth gross and cold humours to gather together… (33)

Toxophilus: This knew Erasmus very well, when he was here in Cambridge; which, when he had been sore at his book (as Garret our bookbinder has very often told me), for lack of better exercise would take his horse and ride about the market-hill and come again. … Running, leaping, and quoiting to be too vile for scholars, and so not fit by Aristotle’s judgment: walking alone into the field hath no token of courage in it, a pastime like a simple man which is neither flesh nor fish. (34)

Philologus: To grant, Toxophile, that students may at times convenient use shooting as most wholesome and honest pastimes, yet to do as some do, to shoot hourly, daily, weekly, and in a manner the whole year, neither I can praise, nor any wise man will allow, nor you yourself can honest defend. /
Toxophilus: Surely, Philologe, I am very glad to see you come to that point that most lieth in your stomach, and grieveth you and others so much. (35)

Toxophilus: So let youth, instead of such unlawful games, which stand by idleness, by solitariness, and corners, by night and darkness, by fortune and chance, by craft and subtilty, use such pastimes as stand by labours, upon the daylight, in open sight of men, … (48-49)

Philologus: The more honesty you have proved by shooting, Toxophile, and the more you have persuaded me to love it, so much truly the sorer have you made me with this last sentence of yours, (49)

Toxophilus: And although there is nothing worse than war, … yet it is a civil medicine, wherewith a Prince may, from the body of his commonwealth, put off the danger which may fall, or else recover again whatsoever it hath lost. (52)

Toxophilus: After them the Turks… have subdued and bereft from the Christian men all Asia and Africa… a manifest token of God’s high wrath and displeasure over the sin of the world, but specially amongst Christian men, which be on sleep, made drunk with the fruits of the flesh, as infidelity, disobedience to God’s word, and heresy, grudge, ill-will, strife, open battle, and privy envy, covetousness, oppression, unmercifulness, with innumerable sorts of unspeakable daily bawdry; which things surely, if God hold not his holy hand over us, and pluck us from them, will bring us to a more Turkishness, and more beastly blind barbarousness… (71)

Toxophilus: But Christendom now, I may tell you, Philologe, is much like a man that hath an itch on him, and lieth drunk also in his bed, and though a thief come to the door, and heaveth at it, to come in and slay him, yet he lieth in his bed, having more pleasure to lie in a slumber and scratch himself where it itcheth, even to the hard bone, than he hath readiness to rise up lustily, and drive him away that would rob him and slay him. But, I trust, Christ will so lighten and lift up Christian men’s eyes, that they shall not sleep to death, nor that they Turk, Christ’s open enemy, shall ever boast that he hath quite overthrown us. (72)

Toxophilus: But, as for the Turks, I am weary to talk of them, partly because I hate them, and partly because I am now affectioned even as it were a man that had been long wandering in strange countries, and would fain be at home to see how well his own friends prosper and lead their life. [possibility of jealousy upon return: use as rhetorical axis] (73)

Lancelot Andrewes, Selected Writings

Lancelot Andrewes, Selected Writings, Ed. P. E. Hewison, Fyfiled Books, Manchester, 1995.

…when Andrewes was asked how many languages he knew, he replied that he could not remember, but he regarded himself as fluent in fifteen. The holiness is also undoubted: five hours a day, every day, in prayer. In fact the combination meant that no one could see him until the afternoon: ‘He doubted they were no true Scholars, that came to speake with him before noon.’ His writings, however, are a different matter: even in his own day his sermons were not always appreciated, by the end of the seventeenth century they were hopelessly unfashionable, and remained so until a famous essay by T. S. Eliot in the 1920s began a revival which does not really seem to have laster. (Introduction, vii)

Andrewes’ final rise to eminence came in the reign of James I, who valued him both for his learning and for his strong support of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. This combination was central to his appointment as a principal preacher to the court, and also to his deployment in theological controversy. In particular Andrewes spent the years 1608 to 1610 locked in combat with the Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine, quite simply the finest theological brain in continental Europe, chiefly over the issue of Authority. The outcome is probably best seen as a hard-fought draw. … in the process of defending Anglicanism Andrewes defined and in a sense actually helped to create it. He saw the doctrine and practice of the Church of England as rooted in a combination of Scripture, the Early Church and Reason… (ix)

Another great contribution to the Anglican tradition by Andrewes was his part in the 1604 Hampton Court Conference, where he was made responsible for the production of the Old Testament historical books from Genesis to II Kings for the Authorized Version of the Bible. (ix)

…it is only fair to mention Andrewes’ behavior in 1613 over the notorious Essex Divorce case, perhaps the most sordid business at the most sordid court in English history. Andrewes followed the king’s wishes and voted for the divorce or rather, as an enraged Abbot put it, ‘among us he said nothing.’ There is always an uneasy contrast between the two sides of Andrewes’ world. On the one hand is his contact with a court where corruption, intrigue and lies flourished (although observers noted that his simple presence served to restrain the king’s customary ‘unseemly levity’). On the other hand is his famous, and rather controversial, private chapel, with its rich furnishings, its silver candlesticks, its elaborate Communion plate, its incense, its whole High Church practice, what contemporaries called ‘the beauty of holiness’. / Andrewes did not long survive the king he served so loyally. James died in 1625; Andrewes on 26 September 1626. (x)

He bears the final responsibility for the form of such celebrated passages as the Creation and the Fall, Abraham and Issac, the Exodus, David’s laments for Saul and Jonathan and for Absalom, Elijah and the ‘still small voice’. (xv)

It came by an Angel then; no man was meet to be the messenger of it. And look, how it came then so it should come still, and none but an Angel bring it, as more fit for the tongues of Angels than of men. Yet since God hath allowed sinful men to be the reporters of it at the second hand, and the news never the worse; for that good news is good news and welcome by any, though the person be but even a foul leper that brings it [2 Kings 7:9] yet, that the meanness of the messenger offend us not, ever we are to remember this; be the party who he will that brings it, the news of Christ’s birth is a message for an Angel. (A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majesty, at Whitehall on Tuesday, the Twenty-Fifth of December, A.D. MDCX. Being Christmas-Day, 2)
The fire is as the fuel is, and the joy is as the matter is. There is not like joy to a shepherd when his ewe brings him a lamb, as when his wife brings him a son; yet that of a lamb is a joy, such as it is. But then, if that son should prove to be princeps pastorum, ‘the chief shepherd in all the land’, that were somewhat more. But then, if he should prove to be a Cyrus, or a David, a prince, then certainly it were another manner of joy, gaudium magnum indeed. As the matter is, so is the joy. (7)

Yea, and the most common part of the inn. For though they sort themselves and have every one of the several chambers, in the stable all have interest; that is common. And as the place public, so is the benefit, and so is the joy public of His as the place public, so is the benefit, and so is the joy public of His birth: Christmas joy right; all fare better for this day. (8)

Who is it? Three things are said of this Child by the Angel. 1. He is a ‘Saviour’. 2. ‘Which is Christ’. 3. ‘Christ the Lord’. Three of His titles, well and orderly inferred one of another by good consequences. (10)

He that could save our souls from that destroyer—were not the birth of such an one good news trow? Is not such a Saviour worth the hearkening after? Is He not? It is then because we have nto that sense of our souls and the dangers of them, that we have of our bodies; nor that fear of our ghostly enemies, … (12)

He, of Whom all the promises made mention, and He the performance of them all; of Whom all the types under the Law were shadows, and He the substances of them all; of Whom all the prophecies ran, and He the fulfilling of them all; (13)

And to be it, ex officio; His office, His very profession, to be one, that all may have right to repair unto Him, and find it at His hands. Not a Saviour incidentally, as it fell out; but one, ex professo, anointed to that end, … not for a time, but for ever; not to the Jews, as did the rest, but even to all the ends of the earth. (14)

And there is yet more particularity in this word Christ: three offices did God from the beginning erect to save His people by; and that, by three acts—the very heathen took notice of them—1. Purgare, 2. Illuminare, 3. Perficere. 1. Priests, to purge or expiate; 2. Prophets, to illuminate or direct them; 3. Kings, to set all right, and to keep all right in that perfection which this world admitteth. And all these three had their several anointings. Aaron the Priest, Elisha the Prophet, Saul the King. In the Saviour Which is Christ, His will was all should meet, that nothing in Him might want to the perfecting of this work. That He might be a perfect Saviour of all, He was all. ‘A Priest after the order of Melchizedek’; a Prophet to be heard when Moses should hold his peace; a King to save His people, ‘Whose name should be Jehova Justitia nostra.’ David’s Priest, Moses’ Prophet, Jeremy’s King. (14)

By His Priesthood to purge, expiate, and ‘save us from our sins, being a propitiation to God for them’; by His prophecy to illuminate and save us from the by-paths of error, ‘guiding our feet in the way of peace’; by His Kingdom protecting and conducting us through the miseries of this life, till He perfect us eternally by Himself in the joys of His Heavenly Kingdom. (15)

They that were not the Lord could save but form worldly calamities, could but prune and take off the twigs, as it were; He, form sin itself, and so plucketh it up by the roots. (17)

But the Prophet knew well that was not their worst captivity, nor should be their best delivery. There was another yet behind concerned them more, if they understood their own state aright, which was reserved to the Messias to free them from. (A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majesty, At Whitehall, on Wednesday, the Twenty-Fifth of December, A.D. MDCXVI. Being Christmas-Day., 23-4)

The greatness of a meeting growth three ways. 1. By the parties who; 2. The occasion whereon; and 3. the end whereto they meet. (25)

…what could Righteousness desire to see and satisfy herself with, that in Him was not to be seen? A clean birth, a holy life, an innocent death; (36)

Righteousness … She turned away her face, shut her eyes, clapped to the casement, would not abide so much as to look hither—at us, a sort of forlorn sinners;—not vouchsafe us once the cast of her eye. (36)

The Jews, they represent Truth; to them it belongeth properly. (38)

Truth is not enough; not the truth of religion never so known, never so professed; not without Righteousness. Truth is but the light to guide us, Righteousness is the way to bring us thither. A light is to see by; a way is to go in; so is Righteousness. (40)

Henry Smith, The Sermons of Henry Smith: The Silver-Tongued Preacher

Henry Smith, The Sermons of Henry Smith: The Silver-Tongued Preacher, Ed. John Brown, D. D.D., Cambridge University Press, 1908.

As he hath put on all our infirmities, so we must put on all his graces, not half so, but all on, and clasp him to us, and gird him about us, and wear him, even as we wear our skin, which is always about us. Then there shall be no need of wires, nor curls, nor periwigs; … (The Wedding Garment, 6)

…because our own righteousness is too short to cover our arms, and legs, and thighs of sin, but still some bare place will peer out, and shame us in the sight of God, therefore we must borrow Christ’s garments, … believe that his righteous shall supply our unrighteousness shall supply our unrighteousness, and his sufferings shall stand for our sufferings, … Now I have shewed you this goodly garment, you must go to another to help you to put it on; and none can put this garment upon you, but he which is the garment, the Lord Jesus Christ. (The Wedding Garment, 7)

But as it is not good to be alone, so Solomon sheweth that ‘it is better to be alone than to dwell with a forward wife,’ Prov. Xxi. 9, which is like a quotidian ague, ot keep his patience in ure. Such furies do haunt some men, like Saul’s spirit, I Sam. Xvi. 14, as though the devil had put a sword into their hands to kill themselves; therefore choose whom thou mayest enjoy, or live alone still, and thou shalt not repent thee of thy bargain. (A Preparative to Marriage, 15)

Discretion is a wary spy, but fancy is a rash spy, and liketh whom she will mislike again. (15)

The third thing is her speech, or rather her silence, for the ornament of a woman is silence; (18)

All these properties are not spied at three or four comings, for hypocrisy is spun with a fine thread, (19)

Miserable is that man which is fettered with a woman that liketh not his religion; she will be nibbling at his prayers, and at his study, and at his meditations, till she have tired his devotion, (20)

He may not say, as husbands are wont to say, that which is thine is mine, and that which is mine is mine own; but that which is mine is thine, and myself too. (24)

Frizzled locks, naked breasts, painting, perfume, and especially a rolling eye, are the forerunners of adultery; and he which hath such a wife, hath a fine plague. (29)

Before we teach parents to love their children, they had need be taught not to love them too much, for David’s darling was David’s traitor; and this is the manner of God, when a man begins to set anything in God’s room, and love it above him which gave it, either to take away it, or to take away him, before he provoke him too much. Therefore, if parents would have their children live, they must take heed not to love them too much; for the giver is offended when the gift is more esteemed than he. (A Preparative to Marriage, 32)

Lorraine & John Roberts, Crashavian Criticism

Lorraine M. Roberts and John R. Roberts, Crashavian Criticism, in New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw, Ed. John R. Roberts, University of Missouri Press, Columbia and London, 1990.

The modest reputation that Crashaw achieved in the seventeenth century suffered a decline in the eighteenth, along with that of most of the other metaphysical poets. The most famous critic of the age, Dr. Johnson, made no direct comments on Crashaw’s poetry; but he did quote Crashaw 103 times in his dictionary, whereas he quoted Herbert only 78 times and Vaughan not at all. (4)

…a letter by Alexander Pope to Henry Cromwell, written in 1710, containing what some call the first sustained criticism of Crashaw’s poetry—a mixture of praise, condemnation, and misjudgment. Assuming that Crashaw wrote as a gentleman poet, “more to keep out of idleness, than to establish a reputation,”… Pope… advised Cromwell to read Crashaw, “to skim off the froth” and find the poet’s “own, natural, middle-way.” He called “Musicks Duell” “very remarkable” and said that, having read Crashaw “twice or thrice,” … Although Pope expressed dislike for Crashaw’s versification, he voiced even greater dissatisfaction with the architectonics of Crashaw’s poetry: “all that regards Design, Form, Fable (which is the Soul of Poetry), all that concerns exactness, or consent parts, (which is the Body) will probably be wanting.” Appended to the Cromwell letter was a list of what Pope considered Crashaw’s best pieces—the paraphrase of Psalm 23, “In praise of Lessius,” “An Epitaph Upon Mr. Ashton,” “Wishes. To his (supposed) Mistresse,” and “Dies Irae Dies Illa.” The omission of what today would be considered Crashaw’s most successful poems—including a number of the religious ones—might seem strange, until we remember Pope’s disdain for religious enthusiasm and his own uncomfortable position as a Roman Catholic in Protestant England. In comparison with other metaphysical poets, Pope ranked Crashaw as “a worse sort of Cowley” yet judged that “Herbert is lower than Crashaw, Sir John Beaumont higher, and Donne, a good deal so.” (4-5)

Coleridge’s daughter, Sara, informed a friend that both her father and Wordsworth had admired Crashaw’s poetry, but, for the most part, as poets they were alone on their side of the Atlantic in their appraisal. In America, however, Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and A. Bronson Alcott all responded favorably to Crashaw’s verse. (9)

Two Victorians who sought to exercise informed critical judgment rather than simply to express appreciation or depreciation of Crashaw’s poetry were Edmund Gosse and Canon H. C. Beeching. Gosse placed Crashaw in a continental context, pointed out what he considered to be the poet’s mannerist tendencies, and attempted to show Crashaw’s superiority to Spee and Gongora. He condemned “The Weeper,” however, deploring “Two walking baths; two weeping motions; / Portable and compendious oceans” (II. 113-14) as the worst lines in English poetry, a view endorsed by a number of later critics of the poem. (13)

Twentieth-century criticism … Two new fallacious ideas that became prevalent and never completely died—that Crashaw was “one of the least English of our great poets” and that he was a “poet of pure emotion” with no profundity of thought—were introduced by A. Clutton-Brock in The Cambridge Modern History of 1906. (16)

Eliot agreed wholeheartedly with Mario Praz that Crashaw, even more than Marino or Gongora, was “the representative of the baroque spirit in literature,” a critical notion expressed repeatedly by later critics, some of whom began to draw explicit parallels between Crashaw’s poetry and baroque sculpture, architecture, and painting. / Mario Praz’s work in 1925 not only used the term baroque for Crashaw’s poetry but also highlighted the central importance of Counter-Reformation influences, especially Jesuit influences… (18)

Also, the old cliché that Crashaw’s poetry lacks structure, that the ideas are “strung together like the beads of a rosary” or by only the most imprecise emotional associations, was effectively challenged by a number of critics during the past two decades. (26)

But far more damaging, perhaps, are the critical introductions in textbooks and anthologies offered to thousands of students who are reading Crashaw for the first time, some of whom will later become teachers and critics themselves. A prime example is the cliché-ridden compendium of Crashavian criticism found in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, in which the student is informed that Crashaw’s poetry is “deliberately artificial and deliberately lacking formal structure,” that “extravagant metaphors [are held] loosely together” and are combined “with almost grotesque effects,” and that the Nativity ode and “The Flaming Heart” culminate in “a swirling, grandiose phantasmagoria of sensual and spiritual ecstasy.” (27)

Even the recent, highly respected work of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski on so-called Protestant poetics serves, in a number of ways, to relegate Crashaw to the fringe, for Lewalski concludes that he was isolated from other English Christian writers of his time and suggests that his poetry was inspired, not by the Bible, but by medieval Catholic and continental sources, which presumably are nonbiblical in their inspiration. [Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1979). (28)

Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Empire

Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Empire; The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, Nation Books, New York, 2004.

I used to wonder why there was no attempt at a general discussion, in book form, of the related phenomena of Anglophilia, Anglophobia, Anglo-Americanism, and Anglo-Saxondom. I now wonder less. (Acknowledgments, 1989, ix)

The following pages are neither a narrative history, nor a cultural survey, nor a full-dress political analysis. But they are offered as incisions, … (ix)

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome, but authors who do not thank their friends are being remiss. Without these friendships, and the stern duties which came with them, … (ix)

…the main duty of an American foreign-service officer was to master the legacy of partition and postcolonialism that has been bequeathed to the United States by the United Kingdom. (Preface, 2003, xiv)

American policy in the 1990s was to a near-fatal determined by… (xiv)

…the President himself was reaching for Churchillian language… (xvi)

But Britain did, and could make itself highly serviceable to any American effort. (xvii)

…which finally put an end not just to the “Greater Serbia” fantasy but to the regime of Slobodan Milosevic himself. (xviii)

…coexistence with acquisitive and aggressive dictatorships was both unwise and immortal as well as ultimately impossible. (xix)

…this signal example of bravura statecraft. (xx)

He can thus be acquitted on the vulgar charge that… (xx)

…well practiced…in invoking the highest ideals of law and procedure… (xxi)

The neoconservatives in Washington were privately furious with Blair, and much of the Britisth press publicly so. The first faction knew that he was by means their “poodle,” while the second could not let go of this facile and memorable coinage. (xxii)

It is an even more considerable condemnation, when one reflects that most actual or potential leaders of the major British parties do not quite match this unexceptional standard. (xxiii)

…Niall Ferguson’s history of the British Empire began to enjoy a considerable vogue among American scholars, … (xxiv)

The English language has become a lingua franca, in India and Africa and elseqhere, not because of its association with empire, but because of its flexibility and capacity for assimilation (and because of the extraordinary literature, more and more of it written by Asians and other former “subjects,” with which it is associated). (xxviii)

…England—the has-been country par excellence. (Introduction, 3)

United States…has a powerful need for evocations of grandeur, which makes it the more noticeable that, when reaching for such necessary evocations, it so often ignores its own past and letters. (3)

This is a supreme, if oblique, compliment to the depth at which the so-called special relationship between the two countries and cultures operates and obtains. (4-5)

The hypocrisies of this marriage of convenience have often been occluded, at least partially, by an apparent cultural and linguistic familiarity. (8)

Beer pumps draw up franchised, tasteless American lagers with German names. (9)

In their protracted struggle to acquire the patina of “class” for their operations and for their many charities and promotions, they have found the patronage of the Prince of Wales to be essentials and continuous. (12)

One could scarcely enter a supermarket without seeing her photograph on the rack, or barely utter a sentence in an English accent without inviting friendly inquiries about her. (13)

England was understood principally as the home of the Windsors; a sort of theme park for royal activities and romances. (13)

This attitude, to which the British embassy defers as a matter of course, (13)

Much can be divined about any individual, however outwardly complex, from his or her explanation of the decline of the Roman Empire. (22)

Macmillan’s analogy is open to every kind of objection. (24)

The original American revolutionaries, many of them drawn form an essentially English class of gentlemen, took the Roman ideal as the model of republican virtue. (27)

…two of that Revolution’s most famous sayings: /
What a pity is it/ That we can die but once to serve our country. /
And:
It is not now a time to talk of aught, / But chains or conquest, liberty or death. (27)

Rome, then, is present in the American idea from the very start. But the Rome cited by Macmillan [later] is a very different one—the Rome of conquest and booty and purple, not the Rome of Cincinatus leaving his plow. (28)

…as long as the idea of empire could draw moral and historic sustenance form some simulacrum of a “special relationship.” (34)

…the word WASP, which denotes a racial and religious group, is only every applied to a certain social layer of it. (34)

As Plutarch put it in his Precepts of Government (here adhumbrated by Sir Ronald Syme in his Greek Invading the Roman Government): … ‘The signal contribution that Plutarch made was less obtrusive. He hit upon a genial device, the sequence of parallel biographies, from legendary heroes down to generals and statesmen. The two nations were thereby recognized as standing on parity. (36)

The Masterpiece Theatre Sunday evening debauch of Englishness is one of the standbys and continual referents for students of Anglophilia and its American mystique. When Alistair Cooke assumes the leather armchair, the free association begins and Englishness takes on its varied guises and incarnations: the civilized country house; the strained but decent colonial civil servant; the regimental mess; the back-to-the-wall wartime coolness under fire; the stratified but considerate social system; the eccentric but above all literate milieu of London in assorted moods and epochs. (42)

This beautifully rendered paragraph… (53)

…reinforced the idea of a civilized kindred people, slow to anger but resolute when roused. (54)

…the distance between admiration and envy has never been a difficult one to traverse. (54)

“The White Man’s Burden” was finished on November 22, 1898, in Rottingdean, Sussex, and sent straight off across the Atlantic to Theodore Roosevelt. It was, in every sense, addressed to the United States. Its explicit purpose [63] was to never Roosevelt in particular, and American opinion in general, to take an unabashed advantage of the conquest of the Philippines. / “Teddy” had just been thrust into power as governor of New York State… Like a number of President McKinley’s supporters, he thought that that was worth fighting for was worth holding on to. But he did not have the language in which to express this imperial yearning. (64)

‘Take up the White Man’s burden— [first line of “The White Man’s Burden”] (64)


By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you. (65)

Kipling… felt hostile to, and wrote against, the principles of the American Revolution and the principles of democracy. … British super-patio though he undoubtedly was, he liked the United State more and more as it decided to move outside its own borders. (68)

When Kipling aimed for the sublime, he always stuck at the imperial. (73)

When, a decade or so later, Kipling became the semi-official laureate of the Roosevelt-Lodge set, with his verse urging white solidarity and the conquest of the Philippines, Twain emerged as the greatest and most scornful opponent of the new imperialism. (73)

Reasonably satisfied as he was that the United States had found an alternative to republican and democratic illusions, and fairly sure as he became that no American fleet was every likely to challenge a British one, Kipling still did not like the Anglo-Saxon cousins all that much. His appeal to them had a purely instrumental aspect, which was the making of a common cause against imperial Wilhelmine Germany. His most energetic hour therefore struck when Britain and Germany went to war. (76)

This was not a happy or fruitful collaboration. (81)

Thus the ground so well watered by Kipling bore fruit after his death… (85)

…a high synthesis of the Episcopal and the social… (122)

He continued to skirt around these aspects of the problem… making an excursion through… before returning with relish to his main theme, which was, as ever, sex and fertility: … (149)

…in this century, the British and the Americans have existed in one another’s imaginations. At one pole, the WASP identity can only confirm and reassure itself by an almost excessive reliance on England and things English. At the other, the British elite makes an instinctive but shrewd determination that its own survival necessitates a metamorphosis of the “Anglo-Saxon” into the “Anglo-American,” with the American element grudgingly admitted to predominate. (150)

This is, in effect, the paradox expressed by Canning when he boasted of having “called the New World into existence in order to redress the failure of the Old.” (153)

In other words, both London and Washington (not for the first time) thought they were being clever at the expense of the other. (153)

On May 13, 1861, the British government “recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy,” which is to say, it adopted a position of feigned neutrality. (157)

In the public realm, there is an almost unappeasable demand for Churchillian invocation. The decline of direct Soviet-American confrontation has slightly lessened the intensity of the Munich analogy, which is the most salient form in which Churchillism lives on. But any issue on principle, or any confrontation with the a lesser power than Russian, can also bring the “lessons of Munich” tripping off a speaker’s tongue. (182)

Churchilliam … “Never give in, never, never, never, never—in things great or small, large or petty.” (This rather unsafe injunction, make by Churchill to the schoolboys of Harrow on one of his few return visits to an academy he had thoroughly disliked, … (183)

…Winston Churchill was the last British Prime Minister who really possessed an Imperial General Staff and who really enjoyed a panoptic grasp of affairs. This, in alliance with his high oratorical style and his generally conservative growl, makes him an ideal fetish object for American “hawks.” (183)

Twain then inscribed one of his own books to young Churchill, remarking pithily on the flyleaf: “To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is noble, and no trouble.” (188)

Having acted with flamboyance at a critical juncture… (191)

Others, taking a more sanctified liberal line, invoked Thomas Jefferson’s lapidary warning against “entangling alliances.” (196)

On one such evening, he recalled in an interview with Sidney Blumenthal of The Washington Post, the hour was late and Churchill was nursing a scotch. “The fact is,” said this rather reduced but still intimidating figure, “that America has now become the hope of the world. Britain has had its day. At one time we had dominions all over the world… But England is gradually drying up. The leadership must be taken over by the United States. You have the country, the people; you have the democratic spirit, the natural resources which England has not… If I were to be born again, I’d want to be born an American.” / On the eve of the best-received and best-assimilated American speech, Churchill seems to have given was to resignation. The response to the speech certainly took him up on this implicit surrender. It is another was of illustrating what can be found in other areas of American culture and politics—that the reverence and affections for things English has increased in direct proportion to the overshadowing and relegation of real British power. (251)

If James Burnham’s concept of “receivership” had ever been made explicit, with the British being asked to disburden themselves of empire in a planned and graduated fashion and the United States moving to assume the said burdens with coordination and consent, there might have been some impressive results. … But in the event, the displacement of Britain by America as a world gendarme and guarantor was a chaotic, brutal, and dishonest process. On the British role, and on the American side a repressed reluctance to actually seem to be seeking one. (252)

Such republican and democratic instincts as did manage to cross the Atlantic form east to west did so as contraband: the astonishing and germinal moral energy of Thomas Paine; … But these are preeminently not the sorts of image that leap to mind when the word “Brit” is uttered in today’s America. (359)

America, founded in self-conscious opposition to the backward, imperial, complacent, hierarchic English, counterposed a certain utopianism of its own to the solid virtues of kingship, social predestination, conquest and dominion. The luminous documents composed by the Founders and ratified as law in the Greek-named city of Philadelphia all show, in the sort of English that has quite disappeared from official usage, an educated disrespect for standing armies, hereditary privilege, state surveillance of the citizenry, “foreign entanglements,” monarchism, and the rest of it. (360)

And every time that the United States has been on the verge of a decision: to annex the Spanish empire, to go to war in Europe, to announce the Soviet Union as the official enemy, to acquire new and weighty “burdens” in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, to embark upon nuclear weapons research, to establish a national nexus of intelligence gathering, there has been a deceptively languid English advisor at the elbow, urging yes in tones that neither hector nor beseech but are always somehow beguiling. (360)

More important, though, are perhaps the long rhythms… (361)