nigelswift
|
Re: Shakespeare: Macbeth
Nov 03, 2006, 16:16
|
OK, I'll bring most of the stuff but
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron
... will be down to you.
|
Littlestone
|
Re: Shakespeare: Macbeth
Nov 03, 2006, 17:38
|
|
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron
Can we keep this environmentally friendly please ;-) Nothing in the pot that you wouldn't find in a decent haggis - and the cauldron's still for the punch :-)
|
moss
|
Henry James on Stonehenge
Nov 05, 2006, 15:30
|
Henry James on Stonehenge, it was probably written round about 1870 and appears in a book entitled “English Hours” Its a good piece of prose by an American writer, and given Stonehenge has just been damned by an American magazine, fitting that it should appear.. " a heart stirring picture in a land of pictures" sadly roads today
;( and not a place for sitting by and watching the shadows shorten and lengthen....
..Stonehenge is rather a hackneyed shrine of pilgrimage. At the time of my former visit a picnic party was making libations of beer on the dreadful altar sites. But the mighty mystery of the place has not yet been stared out of countenance; and on this occasion there were no picnickers we were left to drink deep of all its ambiguities and intensities. It stands as lonely in history as it does on the great plain whose many tinted green waves, as they roll away from it, seem to symbolise the ebb of the long centuries which have left it so portentously unexplained. You may put a hundred questions to these rough hewn giants as they bend in grim contemplation of their fallen companions; but your curiosity falls dead in the vast sunny stillness that enshrouds them, and the strange monument, with all its unspoken memories, becomes simply a heart stirring picture in a land of pictures. It is indeed immensely vague and immensely deep. At a distance you see it standing in a shallow den of the plain, looking hardly larger than a group of ten-pins on a bowling green. I can fancy sitting all a summer’s day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world’s duration and the feeble span of individual experience.
There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring to the nerves; if you are disposed to feel that the life of man has rather a thin surface, and that we may soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial grey pillars may serve to represent for you the pathless vaults beneath the house of history…
|
Littlestone
|
Re: Henry James on Stonehenge
Nov 05, 2006, 16:10
|
That's a nice piece of writing - and written over 130 years ago!
"Stonehenge is rather a hackneyed shrine of pilgrimage..." chimes well what the place has become. And, when you've almost given up hope, we're reminded that, "It is indeed immensely vague and immensely deep... I can fancy sitting all a summer’s day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world’s duration and the feeble span of individual experience."
Beyond Stonehenge at http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/news/#post-53292 looks interesting by the way, and at £6.50 per person, including lunch and refreshments, quite a bargain!
|
nigelswift
|
Richard Jeffries on the Ridgeway
Nov 06, 2006, 08:31
|
From Wildlife in a Southern Country (1879)
Sounds like the Ridgeway was green and we've lost something.
Bugger.
A broad green track runs for many a long, long mile across the downs, now following the ridges, now winding past at the foot of a grassy slope, then stretching away through a cornfield and fallow. It is distinct from the wagon-tracks which cross it here and there, for these are local only, and, if traced up, land the wayfarer presently in a maze of fields, or end abruptly in the rickyard of a lone farmhouse. It is distinct from the hard roads of modern construction which also at wide intervals cross its course, dusty and glaringly white in the sunshine ….. With varying width, from twenty to fifty yards, it runs like a green ribbon … a width that allows a flock of sheep to travel easily side by side.
|
Littlestone
|
Re: Richard Jeffries on the Ridgeway
Nov 06, 2006, 09:39
|
|
Ah, Jefferies at his best again (though I suspect the, "...width that allows a flock of sheep to travel easily side by side." also allowed pigs to do the same ;-)
|
nigelswift
|
Sassoon on Scratchbury
Nov 06, 2006, 09:53
|
Did we get this one?
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/4581
|
Littlestone
|
Re: Sassoon on Scratchbury
Nov 06, 2006, 17:24
|
|
nigelswift wrote:
Nope, but thanks. There's another one on Stonehenge by Siegfried Sassoon - I'll dig it out later.
|
Littlestone
|
Siegfried Sassoon: What is Stonehenge?
Nov 06, 2006, 19:41
|
What is Stonehenge? It is the roofless past;
Man's ruinous myth; his uninterred adoring
Of the unknown in sunrise cold and red;
His quest of stars that arch his doomed exploring.
And what is Time but shadows that were cast
By these storm-sculptured stones while centuries fled?
The stones remain; their stillness can outlast
The skies of history hurrying overhead.
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
|
nigelswift
|
Edward Thomas on Jeffries' Wiltshire downland
Nov 06, 2006, 20:01
|
In his his biography of Richard Jefferies (1909) -
The Downs in this immediate country of Richard Jeffries are among the highest, most spacious, and most divinely carved in rolling ridge and hollowed flank, and their summits commune with the finest summits of the more southerly downs - Inkpen, Martinsell, Tan Hill … Jeffries often thought of the sea upon these hills. The eye expects it. There is something oceanic in their magnitude, their solitude … They are never abrupt, but, flowing on and on, make a type of infinity … they have a hugeness of undivided surface for which there is no comparison on earth.
|
