The Whole Five Feet

Volume 35

The Chronicles of Jean Froissart

The Holy Grail by Sir Thomas Malory

Like most people around my age, I first came in contact with Arthurian legend through the Disney film The Sword and the Stone.  Later, I read T.H. White's The Once and Future King, the first volume of which was the source for the movie.  Neither the book nor the cartoon of The Sword and the Stone has any basis in Malory, but the later volumes in White's series do. Even at a fairly young age, I preferred these later, darker novels to the comic absurdity of Merlin and Wart in Sword and the Stone. In particular, I remember Lancelot's affair with Guinevere and Galahad's death after finding the Grail. I think these moments were among the first in my life as a reader when I regretted what was happening on the page at the same time that I felt it inevitable. And I felt the melancholy of that regret along with the pleasure of knowing that I could be made to feel such things by words on a page.

Like the Disney movie and White's novels, Malory's Morte D'Arthur is a redaction and adaptation of earlier sources.  As such, it can't be called the true story of Camelot any more than its successors can. But it seems more than a coincidence that the most powerful portions of later adaptations are those that stay closest to Malory. At any rate, the passages from Malory on the Holy Grail included here are ripe with the complex emotions I felt when first reading White's later books. Of course, the Holy Grail has become synonymous with impossible goals and it's precisely this sense of impossibility that makes these pages so moving.

There is the impossibility of reconciling the ethical demands of Round Table with the world as it really exists. The impossibility of reconciling what one ought to do with what one wants to do. (Launcelot goes about through much of these pages with a hairshirt on, hoping to do penance for his sins with Guinevere.) Of course, there is the impossibility of the quest itself, a necessary impossiblity, sithen was there never man so hardy to say that he had seen the Sangreal.  But more moving than all of this is the impossibility of simply surviving in what Galahad calls this unstable world.  As these chapters end, Galahad has survived the quest and been made the king of a foreign land, and he has only one request: Lord, I thank thee, for now I see that that hath been my desire many a day. Now, blessed Lord, would I not longer live, if it might please thee, Lord.

A Description of Elizabethan England by William Harrison

Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland were written by several hands and published in 1577 as one part of a projected -- and never completed -- history of the world. They're known today mostly as the source for Shakespeare's history plays and several of his tragedies. In keeping with its generally uncomfortable relationship to historical writing, the Shelf foregoes these famous parts of the Chronicles for its descriptions of contemporary England, written by William Harrison. After the poetic myth-making of Froissart and Malory, it was oddly invigorating to read Harrison's reportorial descriptions of the degree's of people (gentleman, citizens, yeomen and laborers), of the cities and towns of Elizabeth England, of the structure of the Church of England, etc. Not to say my interest never flagged, say, during one of several pages on the amount of wheat in one type of bread versus bran in another. But my attention was rewarded with the following table on vagabondry, which is among the most delightfully strange things I've encountered in the Classics so far.

A gentleman also of late hath taken great pains to search out the secret practices of this ungracious rabble. And among other things he setteth down and describeth three and twenty sorts of them, whose names it shall not be amiss to remember whereby each one may take occasion to read and know as also by his industry what wicked people they are, and what villainy remaineth in them.

The several disorders and degrees amongst our idle vagabonds.

1. Rufflers
2. Uprightmen
3. Hookers or anglers
4. Rogues
5. Wild rogues
6. Priggers or pransers
7. Palliards
8. Fraters
9. Abrams
10. Freshwater mariners or whipiacks
11. Drummerers
12. Drunken tinkers
13. Swadders or pedlers
14. Jarkemen or patricoes

Of the women kind

1. Demanders for glimmar or fire
2. Bawdy-baskets
3. Mortes
4. Autem mortem
5. Walking mortes
6. Doxies
7. Dells
8. Kinching mortes
9. Kinching cooes

I'm not sure I have anything to add at this point; it feels like a pretty comprehensive list.

--CRB, October 5, 2007

Volume 36

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Life of Sir Thomas More by William Roper

Utopia by Sir Thomas More

Despite all that experience has taught us, we tend to have more sympathy for Utopians than for Machiavellians, which I suppose is why the President has higher approval ratings than his Vice-President. In our political discourse, special scorn is reserved for those who seem more concerned with the means by which ends are achieved than with the ends themselves. But someone who thinks only about ends and is careless about the means -- someone who decides upon the most desirable outcome without considering whether it is likely or even possible -- is far more dangerous. All that said, what was most surprising to me, reading The Prince and Utopia for the first time, is how clearly Machiavelli keeps the true end of all his maneuvering in sight, and how frighteningly honest Thomas More is about the means necessary to create a Utopian state.

To begin with, here is the Machiavelli we all know so well:

Every one understands how praiseworthy it is in a Prince to keep faith, and to live uprightly and not craftily. Nevertheless, we see from what has taken place in our own days that Princes who have set little store by their word, but have known how to overreach men by their cunning, have accomplished great thing, and in the end got the better of those who trusted to honest dealing. Be it known, then, that there are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A Prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast.

It isn't that he's immoral or even amoral: he recognizes the difference between good and bad, and he wishes it were possible for a prince to do the former all of the time. But facts are facts. He writes, You are to understand that a Prince, and most of all a new Prince, cannot observe all those rules of conduct in respect whereof men are accounted good, being often forced, in order to preserve his Princedom, to act in opposition to good faith, charity, humanity, and religion.  It would seem that he works within a familiar loop: the primary use of power is to acquire more power.  But that clause, most of all a new Prince, is vitally important.  Machiavelli begins his work with a consideration of the various kinds of princedom, and of the ways in which they are acquired.  First of all, he distinguishes between hereditary princedoms, in which the sovereignty is derived through an ancient line of ancestors, and new ones. Before long it is clear that the new kind are the ones that interest him. Because his rule is not established by convention, a new prince will always have a tenuous grip on his power. Machiavelli's most famously cynical advice stems from this reality.

It's not until the book's last chapter that we are let to understand the reason for this focus. This chapter is titled, with typical directness, An Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians.  The plea that follows has little of the cold calculation typically associated with its author:

If, as I have said, it was necessary in order to display the valour of Moses that the children of Israel should be slaves in Egypt, and to know the greatness and courage of Cyrus that the Persians should be oppressed by the Medes, and to illustrate the excellence of Theseus that the Athenians should be scattered and divided, so at this hour, to prove the worth of some Italian hero, it was required that Italy should be brought to her present abject condition, to be more a slave than the Hebrew, more oppressed than the Persian, more disunited than the Athenian, without a head, without order, beaten, spoiled, torn in pieces, over-run and abandoned to destruction in every shape.

But though, heretofore, glimmerings may have been discerned in this man or that, whence it might be conjectured that he was ordained by God for her redemption, nevertheless it has afterwards been seen in the further course of his actions that Fortune has disowned him; so that our country, left almost without life, still waits to know who it is that is to heal her bruises, to put an end to the devastation and plunder of Lombardy, to the exactions and imposts of Naples and Tuscany, and to stanch those wounds of hers which long neglect has changed into running sores.

Machiavelli wrote in his Discourse on Livy about republicanism, which he championed over princedom as an ideal. But if this last chapter is to be believed, he wanted above all a homegrown rule within Italy. If this had to mean a princedom, then it had above all to be a stable and prudent one. Of course Machiavelli was not the last man to face the choice between the stabilty of tyrannies and more hopeful ideals.

Which brings us (sort of) to Thomas More. It is often said of Utopian societies that they work better in theory than in practice. Maybe so. But what is most striking about More's Utopia is how much of the ugliness is baked right into the theory.  Here are just a few features of this faraway island:

• No man goeth out alone but a company is sent forth together with their prince�s letters, which do testify that they have licence to go that journey, and prescribeth also the day of their return.


• No family ... shall at once have fewer children of the age of fourteen years or thereabout than ten or more than sixteen, for of children under this age no number can be appointed. This measure or number is easily observed and kept, by putting them that in fuller families be above the number into families of smaller increase.


• If [a] disease be not only incurable, but also full of continual pain and anguish; then the priests and the magistrates exhort the man, seeing he is not able to do any duty of life, and by overliving his own death is noisome and irksome to other, and grievous to himself, that he will determine with himself no longer to cherish that pestilent and painful disease.

Draconian limits on travel, government family planning, the forced euthanasia of those too sick to work: that's just the beginning. Most of the other gruesome features of a planned society are in there, too. The problem here, of course, is one of means. More is honest enough to know that some people aren't going to want to live in the society you have planned for them. They're going to want to travel alone, to have a bigger or a smaller family than the state intends, to continue to live after they're too sick to work. And so they'll have to be exhorted to do otherwise, for the greater good. The problem with Utopia isn't that it's impossible -- even if it were, I'd rather live in a Machiavellian princedom.

The Ninety-Five Theses, Address to the Christian Nobility, & Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther

I've sometimes wondered how my Catholic education affected the way I was taught about the Reformation in school. At any rate, I don't think I had a good sense of just how corrupt the Church's hierarchy was until I read Cellini's Autobiography last month. Cellini was a Catholic who relied on the popes for patronage, and he doesn't for a moment pretend that the papacy is anything but a temporal power. It was illuminating to read Luther's Ninety-Five Theses while keeping in mind where all this indulgence money was going.  On the other hand, reading his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, I saw the extent to which the Reformation, too, was about temporal power. Here, for example, is the very first of Luther's Articles of Reformation: Princes, nobles, and cities should promptly forbid their subjects to pay the annates to Rome. In these pages, at least, Luther emerges an another Machiavelli or More -- not contesting theological questions, but telling princes how to do their jobs.

--CRB, October 8, 2007

Volume 37

Some Thoughts Concerning Education by John Locke

My sister recently started home-schooling her four children, and several of my close friends are just starting families, so lately I've done more thinking and talking about education and upbringing than is probably typical for a single 28-year-old. Naturally, my reading has played a part in this. By my count, there are at least half a dozen works in the Classics that concern themselves primarily with education. I'm being reasonably conservative in my accounting here -- not including, say, Franklin's Autobiography, which describes at some length its author's apprenticeship, but including Mill's Autobiography, which takes the specifics of its author's unusual education as its focus throughout. Of course, the Classics as a whole are a kind of treatise on education, in as much as they are an attempt to answer the question of exactly what the educated man needs to know.

The answer to that question -- what should we be teaching our children? -- is destined to remain unsettled, to be restated in each time and place, perhaps even in each human heart. For example, the opening pages of John Locke's treatise on education are largely concerned with bowel movements.

When it comes to stools, Locke believed, People that are very loose, have seldom strong thoughts, or strong bodies. Luckily, Locke had a simple solution to this problem, which was to sit your kid on the can every morning whether he had to go or not -- morning being a time when people have leisure enough ... to make so much court to Madam Cloacina -- and keep him there until he produced something.  Each time Locke tried this experiment he found that in a few months they obtain�d the desired success, and brought themselves to so regular an habit, that they seldom ever fail�d of a stool after their first eating, unless it were by their own neglect.

I bring this up not because I find it funny in a puerile away (which I do), but because it suggests some interesting things about the writing on education that I've found in the Classics. In most societies before our own, formal education was not nearly so rigidly codified as it is in America today. (Nor, it should be said, was it nearly so universal.) If you were a rich man seeking to educate his son, you had far more than the choice of the finest prep schools; you could pretty much start from scratch. Of course most parents farmed the work out, just as they do today. They hired tutors from among the learned class, which is how so many of the great writers and philosophers of previous eras came to write treatises on education. These were men who were trained to begin with first principles and, when it came to education, that is exactly what they did. And so the first thing that strikes me about Locke's concerns here (okay, maybe the second thing) is that they don't belong to what we think of now as education.  Locke decided what an educated man should have -- a sound mind in a sound body -- and  then considered how the things was to be achieved, beginning from the very beginning.

Which brings me to the other point about Locke. His writing about education illustrates perhaps as well as his philosophical writing his theory of the human mind as tabula rasa. I suspect that one of the reasons that we are less inclined these days to start from scratch in education is that we have more modest ideas about what the possible returns might be. Biology, genetics, psychology, nutrition -- they will all come to play their parts in determining when an educated man pays court to Madam Cloacina.

Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists by George Berkeley

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

Reading Berkeley after Locke's writings on education, I was reminded how much the dialogue as a written form owes to the tutor-pupil model. Of course, this relationship is overt in Socratic dialogues. But after them, one tends to think that anyone who uses the form is imitating Plato, rather than imitating actual conversation. That the give-and-take of talking issues out might be more valuable than reading about them on the page, and that the value of that give-and-take might be reproduced and read on the page -- this is unavoidable paradox of philosophical dialogues. I'm often frustrated, when reading them, to find that Crito or Hylas isn't raising quite the objections that I would raise in his place. That he is stumbling unnecessarily over what seems like a simple enough point. But the form certainly has its advantages; when reading a monologist like Hume, one isn't always even sure what objection is being answered to.

Thus, Hume writes about Scepticism:

I need not insist upon the more trite topics, employed by the sceptics in all ages, against the evidence of sense; such as those which are derived from the imperfection and fallaciousness of our organs, on numberless occasions; the crooked appearance of an oar in water; the various aspects of objects, according to their different distances; ... with many other appearances of a like nature. These sceptical topics, indeed, are only sufficient to prove, that the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on; but that we must correct their evidence by reason.

A crooked oar in the water? In another context I would have had no idea what to make of this. But then I knew that all of these examples are precisely the ones that Berkeley had used to argue against the reality of matter. As they duke out the old materialist/idealist debate, Berkeley and Hume act out a kind of dialogue with each other. The difference being that in Hume's writing it's a bit harder to hear the other voice.

--CRB, October 11, 2007

Volume 38

The Oath of Hippocrates

Like Yogi Berra, Hippocrates may never have actually said the line for which he's most famous.  First, do no harm, appears nowhere in the Hippocratic Oath -- or the rest of Hippocrates' extant writings.  The closest we get here is, I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.  Which is sensible, but not nearly as catchy.  On the other hand, he did write Ars longa, vita brevis -- life is short, art is long -- which is catchy, and often attributed to Seneca or Horace.

The belief in medicine as an art, one requiring more than a lifetime to learn, pervades Hippocrates' writing. For this reason, he directs a physician's responsibilities towards his fellow practicioners -- especially his teachers and students -- before his patients. The first stipulation of the Oath is to reckon him who taught me this Art equally dear to me as my parents.Reading the Oath and the Hippocratic Law, which is included in the Classics with it, one gets above all the sense of an esoteric cult whose lessons aren't to be spread among the uninitiated. Those things which are sacred, are to be imparted only to sacred persons, Hippocrates writes; and it is not lawful to impart them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the science.

Journeys in Diverse Places by Ambroise Pare

In keeping with the conventional separation of the time, Hippocrates forbade physicians from performing surgery of any kind: I will not cut persons labouring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this work.  A physician was an artist, a surgeon was a craftsman: Hippocrates would never have spoken of medicine as work to be practiced. This distinction was still upheld almost two thousand years later. When Ambroise Pare became a barber-surgeon in the early sixteenth century, Church law forbade physicians from shedding blood.

Pare's Journeys in Diverse Places is a memoir of his travels with the French army, mostly in battle against the Spanish. He was a kind of freelancer, not employed directly by the army or the state. In Brittany he is given a diamond for performing an autopsy on a wrestler. In Perpignan, he is offered a purse wherein might be an hundred or sixscore pieces of gold to dress the head of a soldier who has been struck for cheating at a dice. Eventually, he finds his way into the King's service.

There isn't much to be learned about surgery here, but there are some wonderful battle descriptions:

They went forth always an hundred or six score men, well armed with cutlasses, arquebuses, pistols, pikes, partisans, and halbards; and advanced as far as the trenches, to take the enemy unawares. Then an alarum would be sounded all through the enemy�s camp, and their drums would beat plan, plan, ta ti ta, ta ta ti ta, tou touf touf. Likewise their trumpets and clarions rang and sounded, To saddle, to saddle, to saddle, to horse, to horse, to horse, to saddle, to horse, to horse. And all their soldiers cried, Arm, arm, arm! to arms, to arms, to arms! arm, to arms, arm, to arms, arm:--like the hue-and-cry after wolves; and all diverse tongues, according to their nations; and you saw them come out of their tents and little lodgings, as thick as little ants when you uncover the ant-hills, to bring help to their comrades, who were having their throats cut like sheep. Their cavalry also came from all sides at full gallop, patati, patata, patati, patata, pa, ta, ta, patata, pata, ta, eager to be in the thick of the fighting, to give and take their share of the blows. And when our men saw themselves hard pressed, they would turn back into the town, fighting all the way; and those pursuing them were driven back with cannon-shots, and the cannons were loaded with flint-stones and with big pieces of iron, square or three-sided. And our men on the wall fired a volley, and rained bullets on them as thick as hail, to send them back to their beds; whereas many remained dead on the field: and our men also did not all come back with whole skins, and there were always some left behind (as it were a tax levied on us) who were joyful to die on the bed of honour. And if there was a horse wounded, it was skinned and eaten by the soldiers, instead of beef and bacon; and if a man was wounded, I must run and dress him.

I was reminded while I read Pare how many of the best volumes of the Classics have been memoirs of this sort, works whose interest rests not in their historical significance but in their narrative energy and descriptive verve.

On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals by William Harvey

The Three Original Publications on Vaccination Against Smallpox by Edward Jenner

The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever by Oliver Wendell Holmes

On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery by Joseph Lister

Scientific Papers by Louis Pasteur

Scientific Papers by Charles Lyell

The rest of the works in this volume are more strictly scientific than Pare's Journeys, but they're all memoirs of a sort. At least, they all draw their arguments out of personal experience. William Harvey's essay On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals begins:

When I first gave my mind to vivisections, as a means of discovering the motions and uses of the heart, and sought to discover these from actual inspection, and not from the writings of others, I found the task so truly arduous, so full of difficulties, that I was almost tempted to think, with Fracastorius, that the motion of the heart was only to be comprehended by God.

The modern reader is likely to be repelled at least a little by the very idea of vivisection. This feeling isn't likely to lessen over the pages that follow, mostly given over to descriptions of cutting open the chests of living animals, watching their hearts beat, poking and prodding their arteries and veins. But the more historically significant point is the effort to learn about the body from actual inspection, rather than through reading Aristotle. Every assertion Harvey makes about blood, the heart, and circulation is bolstered by his personal experience. The same holds true for the works that follow. Jenner's publications on his smallpox vaccine aren't theoretical arguments for inoculation, but records of its practice in rural England. Holmes' essay is a collection of case studies. Pasteur actually refers to his works as Memoir, and like Harvey he grounds every assertion in experience. To this reader, at least, all these experiences on the operating table, on the farm, in the maternity ward and in the lab weren't as riveting as Pare's experience in battle, but taken together they've saved millions of lives.

--CRB, October 23, 2007

Volume 39

Prefaces and Prologues

No part of a book is so intimate as the Preface. So begins the preface to the Harvard Classics' volume of prefaces. I'm not one for general rules of this sort, but by the time I'd finished this volume, I'd begun to think this may be so. At the very least, this book made entirely of prefaces proved to be an intimate book. The introductory form offers only the slightest unity to the volume, which draws from books of science (Bacon, Copernicus, Newton), religion (Calvin and Knox), history (Raleigh), fiction (Fielding and Hugo), poetry (Dryden, Wordsworth, Whitman), criticism (Goethe and Hippolyte Taine), and even lexicography (Samuel Johnson). In the end, the diversity of the works encourages a reader to focus on the writers' respective tones.

Each of their voices balances humility with pride. The former often seems designed to manage expectations; the latter is usually justified by the importance of the work being introduced. Many of the prefaces are obviously designed to secure protection for controversial ideas, which makes striking this balance all the more important. Thus, John Calvin writes to King Francis:

When I began this work, Sire, nothing was further from my thoughts than writing a book which would afterwards be presented to your Majesty. My intention was only to lay down some elementary principles, by which inquirers on the subject of religion might be instructed in the nature of true piety. [...] But when I perceived that the fury of certain wicked men in your kingdom had grown to such a height, as to leave no room in the land for sound doctrine, I thought I should be usefully employed, if in the same work I delivered my instructions to them, and exhibited my confession to you, that you may know the nature of that doctrine, which is the object of such unbounded rage to those madmen who are now disturbing the country with fire and sword.

And Copernicus to Pope Paul III:

I can easily conceive, most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected. For I am not so much in love with my conclusions as not to weigh what others will think about them, and although I know that the meditations of a philosopher are far removed from the judgment of the laity, because his endeavor is to seek out the truth in all things, so far as this is permitted by God to the human reason, I still believe that one must avoid theories altogether foreign to orthodoxy.

Dr. Johnson is on safer footing with his famous Dictionary, which allows him one of the great dedications of all time, to the Right Honorable the Earl of Chesterfield.

Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less.

Prefaces to creative work are something of a different matter. Ideally, such work will stand on its own merits. But in some cases, the authors suspected -- quite rightly, as it happens -- that they were doing something that hadn't been done before, and that readers might need some context, or at least a clarification of intention. In each of these cases -- Fielding, Hugo, Wordsworth, and Whitman -- one has the sense that the theory has grown out of the creative work, not the other way around. Of course, this is just as it should be. In one case, in fact, it's tough to tell the preface from the work itself. Here is Whitman introducing Leaves of Grass (the ellipses are his):

America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions ... accepts the lesson with calmness ... is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms ... perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house ... perceives that it waits a little while in the door ... that it was fittest for its days ... that its action has descended to the stalwart and well shaped heir who approaches ... and that he shall be fittest for his days. The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

--CRB, October 30, 2007

Volume 40

English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray

I'm now four feet through the Whole Five Feet, and only rarely have I felt that there's just too much to digest. When I do, I remind myself that I can always come back after I'm done. There are many volumes in the Shelf to which I expect to return when this year is over, but first of all will be these three volumes of English poetry. In the meantime, I know that a few days isn't enough time to appreciate hundreds of poems, let alone to write something worthwhile about them. So, with that rather inspiring introduction, I've decided just to post a few of my favorites. (I expect to do the same with the next two volumes.)

From Edmund Spenser's Epithalamion

Loe! where she comes along with portly pace,
Lyke Phoebe, from her chamber of the East,
Arysing forth to run her mighty race,
Clad all in white, that seemes a virgin best.
So well it her beseemes, that ye would weene
Some angell she had beene.
Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre,
Sprinckled with perle, and perling flowres atweene,
Doe lyke a golden mantle her attyre;
And, being crowned with a girland greene,
Seeme lyke some mayden Queene.
Her modest eyes, abashed to behold.
So many gazers as on her do stare,
Upon the lowly ground affixed are;
Ne dare lift up her countenance too bold,
But blush to heare her prayses sung so loud,
So farre from being proud.
Nathless doe ye still loud her prayses sing,
That all the woods may answer, and your eccho ring.

Shakespeare's Fifty-fourth Sonnet

O HOW much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The Canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the Roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses;
But--for their virtue only is their show--
They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.
  And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
  When that shall fade, my verse distils your truth.

Ben Jonson's To Celia

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
  And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
  And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
  Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
  I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
  Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
  It could not wither'd be;
But thou thereon didst only breathe
  And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
  Not of itself but thee!

From Alexander Pope's Essay on Man

When the proud steed shall know why man restrains
His fiery course, or drives him o'er the plains;
When the dull ox, why now he breaks the clod,
Is now a victim, and now AEgypt's god:
Then shall man's pride and dullness comprehend
His actions', passions', being's, use and end;
Why doing, suff'ring, check'd, impell'd; and why
This hour a slave, the next a deity.
  Then say not man's imperfect, heav'n in fault;
Say rather, man's as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measur'd to his state and place;
His time a moment, and a point his space.
If to be perfect in a certain sphere,
What matter, soon or late, or here or there?
The blest to-day is as completely so,
As who began a thousand years ago.

--CRB, October 31, 2007