Hardly a Strict Quotation

Early this afternoon, someone’s grocery delivery was left on our doorstep. We called the store, the name of which was printed on the bags, and told them it wasn’t ours, but no one there knew anything about it, and we learned in the process that the store doesn’t make deliveries. We thought perhaps the food items were meant for our neighbors next door, and I was on my way to their house when I met one of them walking up our driveway, phone in hand. The delivery was theirs, by way of a third-party service. The store isn’t far away — about a twenty-minute walk that takes one over a bridge across the creek and wetland, past a park, and then past the restored schoolhouse — just enough to clear the head and build an appetite.

Read the fortieth chapter of Middlemarch.

“Pooh! where’s the use of asking for such fellows’ reasons? The soul of man,” said Caleb, with the deep tone and grave shake of the head which always came when he used this phrase, — “the soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.”

It was one of Caleb’s quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding speech for his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of diction which he associated with various points of view or states of mind; and whenever he had a feeling of awe, he was haunted by a sense of Biblical phraseology, though he could hardly have given a strict quotation.

Later in the day, I became curious about a book on a high shelf, almost out of reach and lying flat between two wind chimes. It was purchased for two dollars at the Friends bookstore at our local library, after being withdrawn from their collection. In scuffed blue library binding, the kind typically found in our old hometown library when I was growing up, it bears the catalog number of 398 R12. Published in 1899, Frithjof: The Viking of Norway, and Roland: The Paladin of France, were written by Zenaïde A. Ragozin, Member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland; of the American Oriental Society, etc. Author of “Chaldea,” “Vedic India,” “Siegfried and Beowulf,” etc.

Frithjof begins in this way:

Old Hilding, King Bele’s tried and trusted counsellor, resided at his handsome homestead with its rich and well-kept farm. Here the aged sage gladdened the restful idleness of his waning years watching the growth of two tender plants entrusted to his care — fairer the North had never seen: the one a lordly oak, straight of trunk, stately of crown, strong to defy the storm: the other a lovely rose scarce open, half dreaming in the bud. Frithjof was the youthful oak; but the rose was known to the sons of the North as Ingeborg the Fair. Not often was one seen without the other.

Charming. If it were up to me, old library books would never be discarded. When they are, though, I’d like them all to be sent to me.

October 2, 2023.

[ 1885 ]