Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Weariness Of The World

Robert Alfred Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion, two volumes in one, vol. 1, 6th edt. (London, 1893), ch. IV., p. 30:

[Speaks Gower] . . . Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things, and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes, and seems to authenticate, your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job.

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The Certainty Of Being Alone

Hippolyte Taine, A Tour Through the Pyrenees , tr. J. Safford Fiske (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1875), 149-51: This valley is solitar...