A Sign

In 1612, John Donne accompanied Sir Robert Drury to Paris, leaving his pregnant wife in London.

Two days after their arrival there, Mr. Donne was left alone, in that room in which Sir Robert, and he, and some other friends had dined together. To this place Sir Robert return’d within half an hour; and, as he left, so he found Mr. Donne alone; but, in such Extasie, and so alter’d as to his looks, as amaz’d Sir Robert to behold him: insomuch that he earnestly desired Mr. Donne to declare what had befaln him in the short time of his absence? to which, Mr. Donne was not able to make a present answer: but, after a long and perplext pause, did at last say, I have seen a dreadful Vision since I saw you: I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms: this, I have seen since I saw you. To which, Sir Robert reply’d; Sure Sir, you have slept since I saw you; and, this is the result of some melancholy dream, which I desire you to forget, for you are now awake. To which Mr. Donnes reply was: I cannot be surer that I now live, then that I have not slept since I saw you: and am, as sure, that at her second appearing, she stopt, and look’d me in the face, and vanisht.

Donne and Drury immediately sent a messenger to London. He returned to say that Mrs. Donne had borne a dead child at the hour her husband thought he had seen her in Paris.

(From Izaak Walton, Life of Dr John Donne, 1675)

| Literature · Oddities

Bard Capers

According to Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Parnell once overheard Alexander Pope reading a draft of The Rape of the Lock to Jonathan Swift, memorized the description of the Toilet, and translated it into monkish Latin. The next day he confronted Pope with the counterfeit verse and accused him of plagiarism, “and it was not till after some time that Pope was delivered from the confusion which it at first produced.”

Also: “Mr. Harte told me that Dryden had been imposed on by a similar little stratagem. One of his friends translated into Latin verse, printed, and pasted on the bottom of an old hat-box, that celebrated passage, ‘To die is landing on some silent shore,’ &c. and that Dryden, on opening the box, was alarmed and amazed.”

| Literature

Telegraphic

During World War II, Evelyn Waugh served as a war correspondent in Ethiopia. One day his editor asked him to investigate a rumor that an American nurse had been killed in an explosion during an Italian air raid. The cable read:

REQUIRE EARLIEST NAME LIFE STORY PHOTOGRAPH AMERICAN NURSE UPBLOWN.

Waugh found that the rumor was false, so he wired back:

NURSE UNUPBLOWN.

| Language · Literature

Odd Duck

This is the opening of Chapter 4 of Mark Twain’s A Double Barrelled Detective Story:

It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.

Twain later recalled that few readers noticed anything wrong with it.

| Literature · Oddities

Stumper

Plutarch wrote that Homer died of exasperation because he couldn’t solve a fisherman’s riddle:

“What we have caught we threw away; what we could not catch we kept.”

The answer is “fleas.”

| Literature · Puzzles

“Book-Larceny”

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/637320

How hard, when those who do not wish
To lend–that’s lose–their books,
Are snared by anglers–folks that fish
With literary hooks;

Who call and take some favorite tome,
But never read it through;
They thus complete their sett at home,
By making one of you.

I, of my Spenser quite bereft,
Last winter sore was shaken;
Of Lamb I’ve but a quarter left,
Nor could I save my Bacon.

They picked my Locke, to me far more
Than Bramah’s patent worth;
And now my losses I deplore,
Without a Home on earth.

Even Glover’s works I cannot put
My frozen hands upon;
Though ever since I lost my Foote,
My Bunyan has been gone.

My life is wasting fast away;
I suffer from these shocks;
And though I’ve fixed a lock on Gray,
There’s gray upon my locks.

They still have made me slight returns,
And thus my grief divide;
For oh! they’ve cured me of my Burns,
And eased my Akenside.

But all I think I shall not say,
Nor let my anger burn;
For as they have not found me Gay,
They have not left me Sterne.

“Sir Walter Scott said that some of his friends were bad accountants, but excellent book-keepers.”

— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890

| Literature · Poems