Travel literature

Travel literature is travel writing considered to have value as literature. Travel literature typically records the people, events, sights and feelings of an author who is touring a foreign place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary.
To be called literature the work must have a coherent narrative, or insights and value, beyond a mere logging of dates and events, such as diary or ship's log. Literature that recounts adventure, exploration and conquest is often grouped under travel literature, but it also has its own genre outdoor literature; these genres will often overlap with no definite boundaries.

One of the earliest known records of taking pleasure in travel, of travelling for the sake of travel and writing about it, is Petrarch's (1304–1374) ascent of Mount Ventoux in 1336. He states that he went to the mountaintop for the pleasure of seeing the top of the famous height. His companions who stayed at the bottom he called frigida incuriositas ("a cold lack of curiosity"). He then wrote about his climb, making allegorical comparisons between climbing the mountain and his own moral progress in life.
Michault Taillement, a poet for the Duke of Burgundy, travelled through the Jura Mountains in 1430 and left us with his personal reflections, his horrified reaction to the sheer rock faces, and the terrifying thunderous cascades of mountain streams. Antoine de la Sale (c. 1388–c. 1462), author of Petit Jehan de Saintre, climbed to the crater of a volcano in the Lipari Islands in 1407, leaving us with his impressions. "Councils of mad youth" were his stated reasons for going. In the mid 15th century, Gilles le Bouvier, in his Livre de la description des pays, gave us his reason to travel and write:
Because many people of diverse nations and countries delight and take pleasure, as I have done in times past, in seeing the world and things therein, and also because many wish to know without going there, and others wish to see, go, and travel, I have begun this little book.
In 1589, Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552–1616) published Voyages, a foundational text of the travel literature genre.
Other later examples of travel literature include accounts of the Grand Tour. Aristocrats, clergy, and others with money and leisure time travelled Europe to learn about the art and architecture of its past. One tourism literature pioneer was Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).

Travel literature also became popular during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) of medieval China.[1] The genre was called 'travel record literature' (youji wenxue), and was often written in narrative, prose, essay, and diary style.[2] Travel literature authors such as Fan Chengda (1126–1193) and Xu Xiake (1587–1641) incorporated a wealth of geographical and topographical information into their writing, while the 'daytrip essay' Record of Stone Bell Mountain by the noted poet and statesman Su Shi (1037–1101) presented a philosophical and moral argument as its central purpose.[3]
In the 18th century, travel literature was commonly known as the book of travels, which mainly consisted of maritime diaries.[4] In 18th century England, almost every famous writer worked in the travel literature form.[5] Captain James Cook's diaries (1784) were the equivalent of today's best sellers.

Langston Hughes February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967

Poet and novelist Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri (1902). His father divorced his mother and moved to Mexico when Hughes was just a baby. He was raised by his mother and grandmother, but after high school he went to Mexico to get to know his father for the first time. He was disgusted when he found that his father was obsessed with money and more racist than most white men Hughes had ever known.

He went to Columbia University for a year, but then he decided that he wanted to learn from the world rather than books. He quit college, hopped a boat to Africa, and as soon as the boat left New York Harbor, he threw all his college books overboard. He took odd jobs on ships and made his way from Africa to France, Holland, Italy, and finally back to the United States.

He got a job working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel, and one day he left three poems he had written next to the plate of the poet Vachel Lindsey. Lindsey loved them and read them to an audience the very next day. Within a few years, Hughes had published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926).

He got involved in the Harlem Renaissance and started to write poetry influenced by the music he heard in jazz and blues clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street... [songs that] had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."

Hughes was one of the first African-American poets to embrace the language of lower-class black Americans. In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), he said, "[I want to write for] the people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round."

In his poem "Laughers," he made a list of what he called "my people": "Dish-washers, / Elevator boys, / Ladies' maids, / Crap-shooters, / Cooks, / Waiters, / Jazzers, / Nurses of Babies, / Loaders of Ships, /Rounders,/ Number writers, / Comedians in Vaudeville / And band-men in circuses - / Dream-singers all."


*Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die, Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly, Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams go, Life is a barren field, Frozen with snow.

*Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

*I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

*When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

*What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up - like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore - And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over - like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags - like a heavy lead.

*An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

*I will not take "but" for an answer.

*Negroes - Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind: Beware the day - They change their mind.

“Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

*I swear to the Lord I still can't see why Democracy means everybody but me.

*It's such a Bore Being always Poor.

*To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.

*We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives . . . Censorship for us begins at the color line.

*What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? . . . Or does it explode?

*Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

*Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.

*But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America—and change soon. We must help that change to come.

*I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.

Poem: "Jet Lag" by Eve Robillard, from when gertrude married alice. © Parallel Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission.

Jet Lag

He flies over the ocean to see his girl, his Sorbonne
girl, his ginger-skinned girl waiting for him in the City

of Light. Everywhere river and almost-spring gardens,
everywhere bridges and rainy statues. Streets going

nowhere, streets going on all night. I love you my mona
my lisa, my cabbage, my gargoyle, Degas' little dancer

in dawn's ragged gown. But on the third day she
picks up her books, tells him she needs to study:

she adores this town, she's not coming home in May, she's
going to stay all summer. Lowers her morning-calm eyes.

He's all right in the cab, all right on the plane droning
him home in only three hours American-key in his lock now

his tick-tock apartment, shiver his shadow, his need
to sleep. Then with a tiredness washing over and

over him and through his raveling bones
he begins to know.

Paul Theroux, 1941 -

Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college he decided to join the Peace Corps in 1963. He later said, "I had thought of responsibilities I did not want—marriage seemed too permanent, grad school too hard, and the army too brutal." He said the Peace Corps was a kind of "Howard Johnson's on the main drag to maturity."

The Peace Corps sent him to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting pieces to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.

He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and he filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975).

*Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

*Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

*Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

*The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume

*It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

*Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

*You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.

*The train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month.

*I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

*It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

*Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

*The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

*Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

*Riding the Iron Rooster.

*The kind of travel I do is a reaction to that. Instead of going to meet gorillas or Bhutan, I prefer to go [my own way] and do things the wealthy wouldn't dare to do.

*Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.

*The drug tour he had hoped would be unique, his own, ... was apparently a widely known trip down a well-traveled path, in the sort of full-color brochure that also described gorilla encounters in Africa and white-water rafting on the Ganges and treks to the Everest base camp and birding in Mongolia.

*There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

*The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

*As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of Money, Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of sex and money.

Lewis Carroll, 1832 - 1898

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson near Daresbury, Cheshire, England (1832). He is best known as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1872), and for the characters the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the White Rabbit, and many others. Carroll was also a gifted mathematician and photographer. His photographs of children are still considered remarkable to this day.

Carroll read Pilgrim's Progress as a young boy, in part to prepare for a life in the ministry. But he suffered an attack of whooping cough at age 17, a late age to get that illness, and as a result he developed a stammer to go along with his natural shyness. After recovering from his illness, Carroll decided that life as a minister would be too demanding.

Instead, Carroll lectured in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, where he had also attended university. Carroll found the work dull and considered most of his students stupid, but he wrote seriously during this time. In 1855, he said, "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication, but I do not despair of doing so some day." The next year he published under the famous pseudonym "Lewis Carroll" for the first time, when his poem "Solitude" appeared in a magazine called Train. The pseudonym is a play on Carroll's real name.

Carroll always felt at ease around children. It has been rumored that his stammer would disappear while he talked with children. Nobody can say for certain if this is true, but Carroll was well known as a storyteller, and he liked telling his stories to children. He first came up with the idea for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by telling stories to the children of the dean of Christ Church, who had a daughter named Alice.

Carroll enjoyed massive success from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and his pseudonym grew into an alter ego that became famous in its own right. Even today, more people know the legends surrounding Lewis Carroll better than they know the biography of the real man, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The stories of Alice and her adventures in the strange wonderland have remained popular to this day. Many readers speculate on the underlying meaning of the tales, but Carroll himself said he only intended the tales as carefree fantasy and nothing more.

Lewis Carroll said, "If only I could manage, without annoyance to my family, to get imprisoned for 10 years, without hard labour, and with the use of books and writing materials, it would be simply delightful!" And, "If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things."

_______________________

*If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

*But I don't want to go among mad people," said Alice. "Oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "We're all mad here.

*Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

*I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then.

*When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

*The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today.

*Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

*One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don't know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter.

*Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

*You could not see a cloud, because / No cloud was in the sky: / No birds were flying overhead - / There were no birds to fly.

________________________________

Dreamland


When midnight mists are creeping,
And all the land is sleeping,
Around me tread the mighty dead,
And slowly pass away.

Lo, warriors, saints, and sages,
From out the vanished ages,
With solemn pace and reverend face
Appear and pass away.

The blaze of noonday splendour,
The twilight soft and tender,
May charm the eye: yet they shall die,
Shall die and pass away.

But here, in Dreamland's centre,
No spoiler's hand may enter,
These visions fair, this radiance rare,
Shall never pass away.

I see the shadows falling,
The forms of old recalling;
Around me tread the mighty dead,
And slowly pass away.

Cid Corman, 1924 - 2004

Cid (Sidney) Corman (June 29, 1924 – March 12, 2004) was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.



Someone I cared for

Someone I cared for
put it to me: Who
do you think you are?

I went down the list
of all the many
possibilities

carefully — did it
twice — but couldn't find
a plausible one.

That was when I knew
for the first time who
in fact I wasn't.

Wallace Stegner, 1909 - 1993

Novelist and teacher Wallace Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa (1909). His father was a schemer who was constantly moving the family from place to place, hoping to strike it rich in one of the Western boomtowns. He watched as his father tried and failed to plant a farm in North Dakota, tried and failed to run a lunchroom in the backwoods of Washington state, sold bootleg liquor in Great Falls, Montana, poured the family's savings into an invention that was supposed to detect gold in the ground, and finally bought a piece of redwood forest in California, only to cut it all down and sell it for firewood. By the time Stegner was 20, he had lived in more than 20 different houses, including, at one point, a derailed dining car. But though he had a tough childhood, Stegner grew to love the great open wilderness of the American West.

Stegner managed to get into the University of Utah by the time he was 16, and he went on to get a Ph.D. in English literature. But while he was working on his dissertation, his brother died of a sudden attack of pneumonia. Then, his mother was killed by cancer. And finally, his father committed suicide. By the end of the 1930s, Stegner had lost his entire immediate family.

He'd already begun writing fiction, but he wanted to write a new kind of novel about the American West. At that time, the only novels being published about the West were full of cowboys and heroic pioneers. Stegner said, "I wanted to write about what happens to the pioneer virtues and the pioneer type of family when the frontiers are gone and the opportunities all used up. "The result was his first big success, his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), loosely based on the experiences of his own family. It tells the story of a man named Bo Mason and his wife, Elsa, who travel over the American West, trying to make it rich.

Stegner went on to write dozens of novels about the West, including Angle of Repose (1971) and The Spectator Bird (1976). But he also started one of the most influential creative writing programs in the country, at Stanford University, where his students included Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, and Scott Turow.

*Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

*A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.

*Hard writing makes easy reading.

*She saw objectives, not obstacles.

*It is something-it can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.”

*One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.

*have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

Much Ado About Nothing First published in 1600

The Globe Theater was burned to the ground. For more than 10 years, it had been the most popular theater in London, and it was the theater where many of Shakespeare's greatest plays had their premiere.

It had been built in 1599 by Shakespeare's own acting company Lord Chamberlain's Men. Shakespeare used his own money to pay for 12.5 percent of the cost. It was the first theater ever built for a specific acting company, and the first to be financed by that same acting company. Among the plays that debuted there were As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Macbeth.

It was a theater in the round, with the audience in a circle around a platform for the actors. It was probably designed this way because most of the actors in Shakespeare's company got their start acting in the street, surrounded by a crowd. The plays were performed in the afternoons to take advantage of natural light. The roof of the theater was open to the elements, and most of the audience didn't even have seats. They just stood on the ground for the entire performance, which usually lasted about 4 hours.

And yet it was the most popular form of entertainment in the city. The theater held about 3,000 people, and it was usually full. At the time, London had a population of about 200,000. So whenever one of Shakespeare's plays was performed, 1 out of every 65 people in the city was at the Globe.

There were probably few props and very little in the way of scenery. But by the end of his career Shakespeare was apparently beginning to experiment with more dramatic effects onstage. On this day in 1613, a cannon was fired during a performance of Henry VIII to mark the King's entrance, the thatched roof caught fire, and the whole theater was lost in an hour.

In 1996, a replica of the Globe Theater was completed in London, and plays are performed there exactly the same way they would have been performed by Shakespeare's company. The performances take place in the afternoon daylight, there are no microphones, and few props. A large portion of the audience stands in the yard to watch the play, and the roof is open to the weather. About 700,000 people visit it every year. The actors say that the audience always pays better attention to the play when it's raining.

William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616

Sonnet 129

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

_______

ROMEO [To JULIET.]
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray — grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

[Kisses her.]

_____________________

Sonnet XXX.

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Poet E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894), who became interested in communism as a young man and traveled to Russia to see it firsthand. He was horrified to find the theaters and museums were full of propaganda, and the people were scared to even talk to each other in public. Everyone was miserable. Cummings went home and wrote about the experience, comparing Russia to Dante's Inferno.

His view of communism was not popular in the literary world at the time, and magazines suddenly began refusing to publish his work. For the next two decades, he had a hard time publishing his books, and he got terrible reviews when he did. Critics thought his exotic arrangements of words on the page were silly, and they said he wrote like an adolescent. Then, in 1952, his friend Archibald MacLeish got Cummings a temporary post at Harvard, giving a series of lectures. Instead of standing behind the lectern, Cummings sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him. The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. He began traveling and giving readings at universities across the country, even though he suffered from terrible back pain, and had to wear a metal brace that he called an "iron maiden." He loved performing and loved the applause, and the last 10 years of his life were the happiest.

E. E. Cummings said, "If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little — somebody who is obsessed by Making."

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

-- Robert Frost

I had no time to hate

I HAD no time to hate, because
The grave would hinder me,
And life was not so ample I
Could finish enmity.

Nor had I time to love; but since
Some industry must be,
The little toil of love, I thought,
Was large enough for me.

Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856–February 3, 1924)

The 28th president of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia (1856). He was one of the few American presidents who came to office after a career in academia. He'd started out as a professor of history and political science at Princeton University, and in 1902, he was appointed president of Princeton. But he ran into a series of disagreements with the Board of Trustees over his ambitious plans to remake the university. He was on the verge of getting fired in 1910, when he received an offer to run for governor of New Jersey. He took the offer, and wound up winning the election by a landslide.

At first, he found that he didn't much enjoy politics. But his talent for oratory and his sweeping reforms of New Jersey government caught the attention of the national Democratic Party. In 1912, he was nominated to run for president after barely two years of government experience. And thanks to the fact that Teddy Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate, the Republican vote was divided, and Wilson won.

Wilson had been a member of the American Peace society and he leaned toward pacifism. As president, he advocated arms reduction and international arbitration of disputes between nations. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Wilson immediately declared that the United States would remain neutral in the conflict, and he repeatedly tried to bring the warring nations to a negotiating table.

In 1917, Wilson drew up a plan for establishing world peace. He believed that if the nations of the world were ever going to get along, they had to form an international organization in which they could work out their disputes. He called this international organization The League of Nations. But nine days later, German submarines began attacking American naval ships. Even though he'd won a second term on the promise to keep America out of the war, Wilson decided that the United States could no longer remain neutral. He justified entering the war by saying, "The world must be made safe for democracy."

It was the first time that the U.S. had chosen to intervene in world affairs outside of the Western hemisphere. By the end of the war, the United States had emerged as one of the most powerful nations in the world. Wilson went to the peace conference in Paris in 1919 with the idea of selling his League of Nations to Europe as a way to prevent any such war from ever occurring again.

But his plan was a huge failure. Before he arrived in Paris, he was a widely respected world leader. But once the Europeans met him, they couldn't stand him. The British prime minister said that Wilson behaved like a heathen come to rescue the missionaries. The French prime minister said that talking to him was like talking to Jesus Christ. He was just too idealistic, and he wasn't prepared for the selfishness of the world leaders who wanted to turn the peace negotiations into a land grab.

The one thing Wilson got the European leaders to agree to was the inclusion of a League of Nations as part of the treaty. But when he returned to the United States, he couldn't even convince his own Congress to approve the treaty. Some senators offered ways of compromising the plan, but Wilson refused to compromise. He went on a cross-country speaking tour to appeal directly to the people, but during the tour, he suffered a massive stroke. He partially recovered from the stroke; he never again functioned fully as president.

Woodrow Wilson said, "If you want to make enemies, try to change something."


*...it is as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.

*A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.

*America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny

*I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.

*Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-

*No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.

*The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history.

*The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

*You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.

*The world must be made safe for democracy.

*Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

*Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.

*No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.

*There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight; there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.

*The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

Raymond Carver

Short story writer Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon (1938). He's known for writing pared-down, realistic stories about working-class people, collected in books like What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Will You Be Quiet, Please? (1976).

He became seriously interested in writing in 1959 while he was taking a fiction-writing class from the novelist John Gardner at Chico State College. Gardner would pick apart Carver's stories line by line. He would cross out words and sentences and tell Carver that he was not allowed to keep them in the story; and he would circle other sections and allow Carver to come up with arguments for why they should be allowed to stay. Carver later said that for the rest of his life he could feel Gardner looking over his shoulder whenever he wrote a story.

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

John Cheever, 1912 - 1982

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer John Cheever, (books by this author), born in Quincy, Massachusetts (1912). He wrote for more than fifty years and published over two hundred short stories. He's known for writing about the world of American suburbia. Even though he was one of the most popular short-story writers of the twentieth century, he once said that he only earned "enough money to feed the family and buy a new suit every other year."

In 1935 he was published in The New Yorker for the first time, and he would continue to write for the magazine for the rest of his life. His stories were collected in books, including The Way Some People Live (1943) and The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953). The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the few collections of short stories ever to make the New York Times best-seller list.

Cheever kept journals his entire life, and a few years before he died in 1982, he told his son that he wanted selections from his journals to be published. The Journals of John Cheever came out in 1990. He wrote about his alcoholism, his depression, his bisexuality, his family, and his writing.

He wrote in his journal: "I worked four days a week on the "[Wapshot] Chronicle," with intense happiness. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I had a course in advanced composition at Barnard College. My weekends went roughly like this. On Saturday mornings, I played touch football until the noon whistle blew, when I drank Martinis for an hour or so with friends. On Saturday afternoons, I played Baroque music on the piano or recorder with an ensemble group. On Saturday nights, my wife and I either entertained or were entertained by friends. Eight o'clock Sunday morning found me at the Communion rail, and the Sunday passed pleasantly, according to the season, in skiing, scrub hockey, swimming, football, or backgammon. This sport was occasionally interrupted by the fact that I drove the old Mack engine for the volunteer fire department and also bred black Labrador retrievers. As I approached the close of the novel, there were, in my workroom, eight Labrador puppies, and on my desk the Barnard themes, the fire-department correspondence, [and] "The Wapshot Chronicle." ... My happiness was immense, and I trust that the book will, in some ways, be a reminder of this."

Thomas Hardy, 1840 - 1928

The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England (1840). Dorset was a poor, rural county where life hadn't changed very much for hundreds of years and older people spoke a local dialect similar to German. Hardy would stay up late reading poetry and magazines, and listening to his grandmother tell stories about the time of Napoleon. His father was a mason and a building contractor, and when Hardy was sixteen he left school and became an apprentice to a well-known architect.

He was more interested in poetry than architecture, though, and he would get up early every morning to study Latin and Greek. When he was twenty-two he moved to London, where he began writing his own poetry. He wasn't able to publish it, and so he tried writing novels instead. His first novel, Desperate Remedies, was published anonymously in 1871. His first big success was Far from the Madding Crowd, published in 1874. He went on to write The Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), and he became one of the most popular novelists of his time.

Most of his novels were first published serially in popular magazines, and Hardy made sure not to write anything that might be considered too offensive to his readers. But when he published Tess of the D'Urbervilles in book form, he included several chapters that were cut from the magazine version.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles is about a young woman who has an illegitimate child and eventually goes on to murder the child's father, but Hardy portrayed the woman sympathetically and critics called the book shameless and immoral. His next novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), created an even bigger scandal.

Hardy had always thought of writing novels as no more than a way to make a living, and by this point he was so fed up with the criticism that he announced he would never write fiction again. He had been writing poetry for over thirty years, and now that he had become a famous novelist he was able to publish much of what he had written. His first collection, Wessex Poems, was published in 1898, and he would publish nothing but poetry for the last thirty years of his life. His Collected Poems came out in 1930.

*Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

*It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

*There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.

*No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

*The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.”

*Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.”

*Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change

*Once victim, always victim -- that's the law!”

*The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him

*Fear is the mother of foresight.



The Self-Unseeing

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.
She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.
Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

_____________

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

The Voice


1Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
2Saying that now you are not as you were
3When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
4But as at first, when our day was fair.

5Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
6Standing as when I drew near to the town
7Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
8Even to the original air-blue gown!

9Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
10Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
11You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
12Heard no more again far or near?

13Thus I; faltering forward,
14Leaves around me falling,
15Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
16And the woman calling.
Notes

1] On Thomas Hardy's first wife. The 1914 edition has the date "December 1912." at the end of the poem.
10] mead: meadow.
11] dissolved to wan wistlessness: "consigned to existlessness" in 1914.
15] norward,: "norward" in 1914.

Thomas Carlyle, 1795 - 1881

The nineteenth century Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle was born in the village of Ecclefechan, Scotland (1795). He studied German literature at school, and after graduating he found work teaching and writing articles for magazines. But he was depressed-he suffered from dyspepsia, and worried about finding a wife and about pleasing his parents. He wanted to write something but abandoned all of his projects almost as soon as he started them. He wrote to a friend, "I must do something-or die, whichever I like better." Finally, he came up with the idea for a book that combined autobiography and philosophy, and he began working on what would become his big breakthrough, Sartor Resartus (1833-1834).

Carlyle started writing a history of the French Revolution at the beginning of the 1830s, and finished it in 1835. He lent the manuscript to his friend, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, but Mill's housekeeper mistook the pile of paper for waste and threw it in the fire. Mill was furious with his housekeeper and offered Carlyle two hundred pounds in compensation. Carlyle said that he felt like a man who "has nearly killed himself accomplishing zero." But he went right back to work and rewrote the entire book in less than two years. The French Revolution was published in 1837, and it was a great success. George Eliot said, "No novelist has made his creations live for us more thoroughly than Carlyle has made Mirabeau and the men of the French Revolution. . . . What depth of appreciation, what reverence for the great and godlike under every sort of earthy mummery!"

Carlyle was interested in the great, towering figures of history, like Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, and Shakespeare. He wrote a book called On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), in which he says, "No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men." Some people in the first half of the twentieth century saw the book as a rejection of democracy, and Carlyle has become less popular than he once was.

Thomas Carlyle said, "He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem."

Alfred Tennyson, 1809 - 1892

Poet Alfred Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire, England (1809). Tennyson lived at a time when authors like Charles Dickens were turning the novel into the most popular form of literature, and he was one of the last poets who could sell as many books as a novelist. Nearly every literate household owned at least one copy of his poetry. He was also one of the last poets of an era when poets wrote for the spoken voice. In Tennyson's day, poetry was meant to be read aloud among groups of people, as a form of parlor entertainment, like karaoke. He was a friend of Queen Victoria, and he wrote public poems for England, including "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852) and "Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), that became unofficial national anthems.

At the height of his career, he was one of the most famous men in England. He loved poetry so much that he wrote almost nothing else. Unlike other poets of his day, he never wrote a preface, an essay, a review, a diary, a memoir, or even a fragment of autobiography. He hated writing letters, because they took time away from his real work.

Tennyson moved with his wife, Emily, to the Isle of Wight to a big, secluded house called Farringford. Emily loved that their clocks were not even synchronized with those of the rest of the world. Alfred took walks on the great chalk cliffs overlooking the sea, composing his poems to the rhythm of his own footsteps.

In 1864, he published Enoch Arden, which had the largest sales of any book during his lifetime. More than 40,000 copies sold on publication, and in the first year it made Tennyson more than £8,000, as much as the income of many of the richest men in England. In London, Tennyson was followed in the streets by admirers, and the walls of his country estate were lined with tourists who sometimes even came up to the house and peered into the windows to watch the family eat their dinner.

At the age of seventy-five, he was offered a lordship in honor of his poetry. It was the first time in history that any Englishman had ever been given a title for literary achievement alone. Tennyson said that he accepted the title on behalf of all literature. And that is why we now call him Alfred, Lord Tennyson.



*tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

*I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.

*Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

*Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

*To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

*Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control - these three alone lead to power

*Sweet is true love that is given in vain, and sweet is death that takes away pain.

*Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

-----------------

excerpts from In Memoriam

ii

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasped no more—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

viii

Love is and was my Lord and King,
And in his presence I attend
To hear the tidings of my friend,
Which every hour his couriers bring.

Love is and was my King and Lord,
And will be, though as yet I keep
Within his court on earth, and sleep
Encompassed by his faithful guard,

And hear at times a sentinel
Who moves about from place to place,
And whispers to the worlds of space,
In the deep night, that all is well.

William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England (1564). He left behind no personal papers whatsoever—no letters, no diaries, not even any manuscripts. For that reason, most of the details about his life are a mystery. What we do know is that he was born at a time when England was just beginning to calm down after decades of religious civil war between Catholics and Protestants. Historians can't be sure, but it is likely that Shakespeare himself grew up Catholic, even though it was technically illegal to be a practicing Catholic at the time. We know that his mother came from a Catholic family, and his father secretly signed a Roman Catholic "Spiritual Testament" and hid it in the rafters of his home.

So Shakespeare may have grown up with the idea that his family was secretly attached to an ancient but now forbidden religion. And there's some evidence that when he was about 16, after attending the public school in his town, he may have taken a job as a tutor for two wealthy Catholic families in Lancashire. If he did, then he would have met a famous Catholic dissident named Edmund Campion who was living in secret with those two families at that time, and who was eventually caught and executed.

If Shakespeare was working as a tutor in his late teens, he must have returned to his home town in 1582, because it was that year that he was forced into a marriage with a woman he'd gotten pregnant: Anne Hathaway. It was apparently not a happy marriage. In 1587, Shakespeare left his family in Stratford and went to live in London by himself, where he began his life as an actor and playwright.

As a playwright, Shakespeare first made his name as a writer of comedies. His most successful early plays were The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, and within a few years, he was among the most popular writers in England. His plays generally attracted an audience of about 3,000 people, at a time when London had a population of about 200,000. So whenever one of Shakespeare's plays was performed, one out of every 65 people in the city was in the audience.

His early popularity made him a lot of enemies. The very first person ever to write about Shakespeare was the poet Robert Greene, who accused Shakespeare of plagiarism, calling him, "An upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers." And in fact most of Shakespeare's plays were not original, but based on historical events or old stories. What made them great was his extraordinary ability with language. He used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words.

But despite his success, he continued to live in a series of small rented rooms around London, a two-day journey from his family's home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then, in 1596, Shakespeare learned that his son, Hamnet, died. And even though he hadn't spent much time with the boy, the event apparently had a huge effect on him. It was not long after that news that Shakespeare began writing his first great revenge tragedy, Hamlet, which was first brought to the stage around 1600. Scholars believe that Shakespeare chose to play the role of the ghost.

He went on to produce a series of tragedies in the next several years that are generally considered his greatest work, including Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1605). He planned to retire in 1611, after writing his play The Tempest (1611). But he came out of retirement to write at least one more play: Henry VIII (1613).

Sonnet 29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Emily Brontë July 30, 1818 – December 19, 1848

The novelist Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England (1818). She's known for the only novel she ever wrote, Wuthering Heights (1848), about a boy from the streets of Liverpool named Heathcliff who is adopted into a wealthy landowning family and falls in love with his adopted sister, Catherine Earnshaw. When he realizes he can't have her, he tries to take revenge upon his entire adopted family. It's a passionate, tragic love story written by a woman who apparently never had a romantic relationship with anyone herself. In fact, as far as we know, she rarely even spoke to anyone other than her immediate family members.

Some scholars think she may have gotten the idea for the novel from her brother's life. He was fired from a job as a tutor after it was rumored that he had an affair with the mother of the children he was supposed to be teaching. He was also suffering from alcoholism and addiction to laudanum after trying — and failing — to become a painter in London. It's possible that Branwell began to tell his sister about all his life experiences — his addictions, his love affairs, and his failed attempt to become a painter.

Just after the novel came out, Emily's brother began to fall ill. She took care of him for the next several months, until he died in September 1848. She came down with the same illness a month later, and she had died before the end of the year. She was only 30 years old.


*A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.

*A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.

*Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.

*Having leveled my palace, don't erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.

*Honest people don't hide their deeds.

*I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.

*I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you.

*I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.

*I see heaven's glories shine and faith shines equal.
Emily Bronte

*I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.

*I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.

*I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after.

*If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.

*Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?

*Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.

*Yes, as my swift days near their goal, 'tis all that I implore: In life and death a chainless soul, with courage to endure.

Hard Times

'Girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, 'I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?'

'Sissy Jupe, sir,' explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.

'Sissy is not a name,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Don't call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.'

'My father as calls me Sissy. sir,' returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.

'Then he has no business to do it,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Tell him he mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?'

'He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.'

Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.

'We don't want to know anything about that, here. You mustn't tell us about that, here. Your father breaks horses, does he?'

'If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.'

'You mustn't tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?'

'Oh yes, sir.'

'Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.'

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

'Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!' said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. 'Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.'

The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely whitewashed room, irradiated Sissy. For, the boys and girls sat on face of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the other side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the comer of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end. But, whereas the girl was dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His shortcropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

'Bitzer,' said Thomas Gradgrind. 'Your definition of a horse.'

'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.'

She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have blushed deeper than she had blushed all this time. Bitzer, after rapidly blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the light upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennae of busy insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead, and sat down again.

Christopher Marlowe, 1564 - 1593

It was on 26th February in 1564 that the playwright Christopher Marlowe was baptized in Canterbury, England. We're not sure of his birthday. He was one of the most prominent playwrights of his lifetime, surpassed only by Shakespeare. When he began his career, most English plays were written in rhyming couplets, but Marlowe wrote in blank verse, without end rhymes. Other playwrights, including Shakespeare, followed his example.

He lived an exciting life. He was a child prodigy and managed to get into Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, even though he was the son of a shoemaker. His school records show that he was frequently absent from class because he was working for Queen Elizabeth's secret service. There is some evidence that he continued to work as a secret agent for the queen for the rest of his life. In the 1590s, while he was producing his plays, church officials began to accuse him of espousing atheism, a charge that could be punished by torture. On May 18, 1593, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but he died in a fight over a bar bill before the police could find him.

Conspiracy theorists have wondered about Marlowe's death for centuries, and there is a group called the Marlovians who believe that Marlowe's death was actually faked by the queen in order to protect Marlowe from the Church. They believe the queen actually whisked Marlowe away to Italy, where he continued writing plays. They also believe that Marlowe used an actor named Shakespeare as a front man to cover up his identity.

Marlovians point out that many of Shakespeare's plays mention places in Marlowe's home district of Kent, while they never mention the places near where Shakespeare was born. A tavern mentioned in Henry IV actually belonged to Marlowe's sister.

Marlovians also point out that many of Shakespeare's plays deal with themes of exile and false identity.

But few Shakespeare scholars take this conspiracy theory seriously. And so Marlowe is best remembered for his play Dr. Faustus (c. 1594), about a scientist who sells his soul to the devil and conjures up Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the history of the world.


*Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”

*While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position”

*Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss! Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! Come Helen, come give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena.”

*Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars”

*I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance”

* Comparisons are odious. 1

* I ’m armed with more than complete steel,—
The justice of my quarrel.

* Excess of wealth is cause of covetousness.

*Now will I show myself to have more of the serpent than the dove; that is, more knave than fool.

*Love me little, love me long.

*Honour is purchas'd by the deeds we do.

*Virtue is the fount whence honour springs.

*That love is childish which consists in words.

*It lies not in our power to love, or hate,
For will in us is over-rul'd by fate.

*Accursed be he that first invented war.

*Wild savages, that drink from running springs,
Think water far excels all earthly things;
But they, that daily taste neat wine, despise it.

*Our swords shall play the orators for us.

THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE

by: Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

Come live with me, and be my love;
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
An if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing
For they delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.