OCTOBER
1.
‘Cat!’ repeated the old gentleman. ‘Puss, Kit, Tit, Grimalkin, Tabby, Brindle! Whoosh!’ with which last sound, uttered in a hissing manner between his teeth, the old gentleman swung his arms violently round and round.
2.
Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.
3.
I shall never forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat; for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants, having that trouble, should take a dislike to the poor creature.
4.
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
5.
He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.
—Milk for the pussens, he said.
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Wonder what I look like to her.
6.
Eppie, with the rippling radiance of her hair and the whiteness of her rounded chin and throat set off by the dark-blue cotton gown, laughing merrily as the kitten held on with her four claws to one shoulder, like a design for a jughandle, while Snap on the right hand and Puss on the other put up their paws towards a morsel which she held out of the reach of both – Snap occasionally desisting in order to remonstrate with the cat by a cogent worrying growl on the greediness and futility of her conduct; till Eppie relented, caressed them both, and divided the morsel between them.
7.
Yet some great souls on gain so keen are set,
They’ll eat a cat to win a trifling bett!
While some, in worsted hose and shabby scratch,
Ride fifty miles to see — a boxing match !
Though few,— but to obtain some secret end,
Would cross the threshold to relieve a friend !
1.
Herbs, garlic,
cheese, please let me in!
Souffles, salads,
Parker House rolls,
please let me in!
Cook Helen,
why are you so cross,
why is your kitchen verboten?
2.
One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese?
3.
‘Hellish dark and smells of cheese.’
4.
‘Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese — toasted, mostly.’
5.
I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far,
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me
In any summer-house in Christendom.
6.
Place toast and cheese in the middle of the dressed plates and serve. A simple dish but one with pleasant contrasts of heat and coolness, the freshness of the salad and the gamey warmth of its proteinous counterpart.
Cheese is philosophically interesting as a food whose qualities depend on the action of bacteria — it is, as James Joyce remarked, ‘the corpse of milk’.
7.
… the circumjacent region of sitting-room was of a comparatively pastureless and shifty character: imposing on the waiter the wandering habits of putting the covers on the floor (where he fell over them), the melted butter in the armchair, the bread on the bookshelves, the cheese in the coalscuttle, and the boiled fowl into my bed in the next room – where I found much of its parsley and butter in a state of congelation when I retired for the night.
1.
At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes
A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.
2.
To satisfie the sharp desire I had
Of tasting those fair Apples, I resolv’d
Not to deferr; hunger and thirst at once,
Powerful perswaders, quick’nd at the scent
Of that alluring fruit, urg’d me so keene.
3.
‘The world must exist, to have the shape of a pear; and that the world is shaped like a pear, and not like an apple, as the fools of Oxford say, I have satisfactorily proved in my book. Now, if there were no world, what would become of my system? But what do you propose to do in London?’
4.
Whann the fayre apple, rudde as even skie,
Do bende the tree unto the fructyle grounde;
When joicie peres, and berries of blacke die,
Doe daunce in ayre, and call the eyne arounde …
5.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
6.
One good gift has the fatal apple given, —
Your reason: – let it not be overswayed
By tyrannous threats to force you into faith
’Gainst all external sense and inward feeling:
Think and endure, — and form an inner world
In your own bosom — where the outward fails;
So shall you nearer be the spiritual
Nature, and war triumphant with your own.
7.
Lo! sweeten’d with the summer light,
The full-juic’d apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
1.
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
2.
The sun descending in the west,
The evening star does shine;
The birds are silent in their nest,
And I must seek for mine.
3.
Bright spark, shot from a brighter place,
Where beams surround my Saviour’s face,
Canst thou be any where
So well as there?
4.
On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
5.
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
6.
There, by the starlit fences,
The wanderer halts and hears
My soul that lingers sighing
About the glimmering weirs.
7.
Oh, float into our azure heaven again!
Be there Love’s folding-star at thy return;
The living Sun will feed thee from its urn
Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn
In thy last smiles; adoring Even and Morn
Will worship thee with incense of calm breath
And lights and shadows;
1.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
2.
Mr. James Harthouse passed a whole night and a day in a state of so much hurry, that the World, with its best glass in his eye, would scarcely have recognized him during that insane interval, as the brother Jem of the honourable and jocular member. He was positively agitated. He several times spoke with an emphasis, similar to the vulgar manner. He went in and went out in an unaccountable way, like a man without an object. He rode like a highwayman. In a word, he was so horribly bored by existing circumstances, that he forgot to go in for boredom in the manner prescribed by the authorities.
3.
“… the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. If you had married this girl you would have been wretched. Of course you would have treated her kindly. One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.”
4.
Agathocles’ pot, — a Mordecai in your gate, — a Lazarus at your door, — a lion in your path, — a frog in your chamber, — a fly in your ointment, — a mote in your eye, a triumph to your enemy — an apology to your friends, — the one thing not needful, — the hail in harvest, — the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet — the bore par excellence.
5.
Society is now one polish’d horde
Form’d of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.
6.
‘I don’t know. We women can’t go in search of adventures — to find out the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about the plants: they are often bored, and that is the reason why some of them have got poisonous.’
7.
She found Mira lolling beneath a capacious lampshade looking inexpressibly bored. Her hostess gathered by her silhouette that the temptation to poke a finger through a Chinese vellum-screen, painted with water-lilies and fantastic swooping birds, was almost more than she could endure.
‘My dear, won’t you dance for us?’ she asked.