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This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1896. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... A DEFENCE OF ENGLISH SPRING That is the artificial springtide of our imitative Northern poets. Strange that till the present century hardly any English versifier-- save Shakespeare, in a stray note or two--ever ventured to put on paper the real features of our warping English March or of our fickle English April. The calendar of our poets, especially as regards spring, is borrowed, or was borrowed till the end of the eighteenth century, not from the daily reports of the Meteorological Office--pardon the obvious anachronism--but from the " classical" calendar of Virgil and Theocritus. Stranger still that the absurd defiance of plain observation thus introduced should have infected even the vocabulary and the stock phrases of everyday life, so that we talk to-day of a "perpetual spring" as the ideal of a perfect climate: whereas if we ever thought of what we were saying (which we don't do) we would certainly talk instead of a perpetual summer. The common expression is correct enough in the mouth of a South European, for whom spring is the delightful middle breathing space between the draughty chilliness of open winter and the sweltering aridity of high August noontide; but it is simply ridiculous on the alien lips of the remote Hyperborean Briton. Nobody who took his language and his ideas direct from nature could ever dream of holding up as the model of a delicious climate that alternation of swirling, dusty nor'-easters and boisterous, drenching sou'-westers which we in England recognise as spring.--Extract from an Evening Paper, April 5, 1883. Unnamed, unknown, but surely bred Where Thames, once silver, now runs lead, Whose journeys daily ebb and flow 'Twixt Tyburn and the bells of Bow, You late in learned prose have told How, for the happy bards of old, Spring...
| ISBN-13 | 9781153832168 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 115383216X |
| Weight | 0.48 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.33 In |
| List Price | $14.14 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 140 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2010-03-01 |
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