October 13th, 2006 | Excerpts
1844, DP, February, Poetry, Whole
BY HARRY FRANCO.
‘The sea, the sea, the o—pen sea, the blue, the fresh;’ but here we halt;
Mr. Cornwall knew very little about the sea, or he would have written SALT.
‘The whales they whistled, the porpoise rolled,
And the dolphins bared their backs of gold;’
Worse and worse; more blunders than words, and such a jumble!
Whales spout, but never whistle; dolphins’ backs are silver; and porpoises never roll, but tumble.
‘It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies,
And like a cradled creature lies,’ and squalls,
He should have added; but to avoid brawls
With the poet’s friends I’ll quote no more; but entre nous,
Those who write correctly about the sea are exceeding few.
Young Dana with us, and Marryat over the water,
Are all the writers that I know of, who appear to have brought a
Discerning eye to bear on that peculiar state of existence,
An ocean life, which looks so romantic at a distance.
To succeed where every body else fails, would be an uncommon glory,
While to fail would be no disgrace; so I am resolved to try my hand upon a sea-story.
In naming sea-authors, I omitted Cooper, Chamier, Sue, and many others,
Because they appear to have gone to sea without asking leave of their mothers:
For those good ladies never could have consented that their boys should dwell on
An element that Nature never fitted them to excel on.
Their descriptions are so fine, and their tars so exceedingly flowery,
They appear to have gathered their ideas from some naval spectacle at the ‘Bowery;’
And in fact I have serious doubts whether either of them ever saw blue water,
Or ever had the felicity of saluting the ‘gunner’s daughter.’
Continue reading →
September 23rd, 2006 | Project Gutenberg
1887, Poetry
The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi, by Giacomo Leopardi. Translated by Frederick Townsend. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887.
Thanks to Daniel Emerson Griffith for post-processing this book.
September 9th, 2006 | Project Gutenberg
1900, Poetry
Primavera: Poems by Four Authors, by Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps. 1900.
Thanks to Sankar Viswanathan for post-processing this book.
Bookp(h)ile
September 3rd, 2006 | Excerpts
1865, DP, Poetry, Whole
To make this condiment your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half-suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
And, lastly, o’er the flavored compound toss
A magic soup-spoon of anchovy sauce.
O green and glorious!–O herbaceous treat!
’Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day!”
More from The Jest Book, by Mark Lemon. He lost me at anchovy sauce.
September 27th, 2005 | Excerpts
1890, DP, Poetry, Whole
“He that has money in the scales,” says Saádí, “has strength in his
arms, and he who has not the command of money is destitute of friends in
the world.”—Hundreds of similar sarcastic observations on the power of
wealth might be cited from the Hindú writers, such as: “He who has riches
has friends; he who has riches has relations; he who has riches is even
a sage!” The following verses in praise of money are, I think, worth
reproducing, if only for their whimsical arrangement:
Honey,
Our Money
We find in the end
Both relation and friend;
’Tis a helpmate for better, for worse.
Neither father nor mother,
Nor sister nor brother,
Nor uncles nor aunts,
Nor dozens
Of cousins,
Are like a friend in the purse.
Still regard the main chance;
’Tis the clink
Of the chink
Is the music to make the heart dance.
I’ve been post-processing Flowers from a Persian Garden, and Other Papers (1890) by W. A. Clouston since Februrary. Actually, I started it in February, set it aside for long months, and am now getting back to it.
It is a fabulous work! It’s a compilation of papers on Saádí’s Gulistán, “Oriental” humor (meaning Turkish, Arabic and Persian), the Tútí Náma (Tales of a Parrot), Rabbinical tales, “An Arabian Tale of Love” (the story of Majnún and Laylá), jokes about the clergy in the middle ages, and beards.
It’s chock-full of references to other works that I’d like to see and/or provide to PG. Some are there of course, like Clouston’s own [Book of Noodles][], but others, like the original translation into English of the Gulistán (by Francis Gladwin in 1808) are not. (There are a couple of other translations into English available on the net, but the point for me is to “complete the set.”)
One of the best things about this book, besides it’s sheer readability and humor, is its footnotes. They are extensive, complex and complete. No ibid.s here. They enhance the main text, give references for further reading, relate discussions about the variants of the stories, and have more jokes. Sometimes, like in the footnote I’ve replicated above, the information is there just because Clouston couldn’t bear to leave it out. Thank goodness for that!
It will be a while before the text is posted to PG (the index and cross-references are rather complicated), but I hope this excerpt will encourage you to watch for it!
August 21st, 2005 | Project Gutenberg
1893, Poetry
Point Lace and Diamonds, published 1893, by George Augustus Baker (1849-1906).
Here’s a contemporary review in The Atlantic Monthly (Vol 36, Issue 213):
Mr. Baker has a cleverness which, without being too fine or deep, is pleasant; and his pretty book of society verses is one that you may read with a fair degree of “cheerfulness and refreshment.” Our fashionable life affords scope enough for the more amiable sort of light satire, and Mr. Baker is fortunately not a satirist who cares much to moralize his theme. He does not begin to exhaust his material; the situations he suggests or portrays are not the most unhackneyed, but then, he does them with dramatic skill, and he renders without unnecessary vulgarity the tone and talk of the kind of stylish girls whose souls are in their clothes…
The Language of Love.
Oh! he was a student of mystic lore;
And she was a soulful girl
All nerves and mind, of the cultured kind
The paragon, pride, and pearl.
They loved with a neo-Concordic love,
Woofed weirdly with wistful woe.
They sat in a glen, remote from men,
Their converse was high and low.
“What marvellous words of marvellous love,
Speak marvellous souls like these?”
I drew me nigh till their faintest sigh
Was heard with the greatest ease.
“’Oo’s ’ittle white lammy is ’oo?” breathed he;
“’Oors. ’Oo’s lovey-dovey is ’oo?”
“’Oors! ’Oors! Would ’oo k’y if dovey should die?”
“No’p!—tause ’ittle lammy’d die too.”
How truthful we poets! The “language of Love”
Is a phrase we employ full oft;
But whenever we do, we prefix thereto,
You’ve noticed, the adjective “soft.”
Thanks to Melissa Er-Raqabi for Post-Processing this book!
July 3rd, 2005 | Project Gutenberg
1877, Fiction, Poetry
Harry, by The Author of Mrs Jerningham’s Journal (Fanny Wheeler Hart). This 1877 work is a Romance in Poetic Form — the story of a young wife and her, er… misunderstood husband.
It actually is a pretty entertaining read for 19th century romance fiction. The poetry is simple, which forces the narrator to not be quite so florid.
Thanks to William Flis for Post Processing this book!
February 7th, 2005 | Project Gutenberg
1853, Poetry
The Kings and Queens of England with Other Poems, by Mary Ann H. T. Bigelow. A self-published book of poetry from 1853. A bit naïve, a bit religious, but somehow compelling for its glimpse of a matron’s life in the mid-1800’s.