The talk in another thread of "florid" style (and the implications such talk bears for our decadent days) made me think of Sir Thomas Browne.

CAS was a great admirer of Sir Thomas Browne's writings. Those who are interested in learning more about Browne could do worse than to consult this Wikipedia article (with all the usual caveats). Below is an excerpt from Browne's famous work Hydriotaphia, to whet or repel the appetite, as the case may be:

Quote:

Why the Female Ghosts appear unto Ulysses, before the Heroes and masculine spirits? Why the Psyche or soul of Tiresias is of the masculine gender; who being blinde on earth sees more then all the rest in hell; Why the Funerall Suppers consisted of Eggs, Beans, Smallage, and Lettuce, since the dead are made to eat Asphodels about the Elyzian medows? Why since there is no Sacrifice acceptable, nor any propitiation for the Covenant of the grave; men set up the Deity of Morta, and fruitlesly adored Divinities without ears? it cannot escape some doubt.
The dead seem all alive in the humane Hades of Homer, yet cannot well speak, prophesie, or know the living, except they drink bloud, wherein is the life of man. And therefore the souls of Penelope's Paramours conducted by Mercury chirped like bats and those which followed Hercules made a noise but like a flock of birds.

Who could not find fascinating a writer admired by both Dr. Johnson and Thomas de Quincey? (It's hard to think of a more antipodal pair in English letters). As De Quincey himself enthused about Hydriotaphia,

Quote:

What a melodious ascent as of a prelude to some impassioned requiem breathing from the pomps of earth, and from the sanctities of the grave! What a fluctus decumanus of rhetoric! Time expounded, not by generations or centuries, but by the vast periods of conquests and dynasties: by cycles of Pharaohs and Ptolemies, Antiochi and Arsacides!

This is a different kind of floridity---if, indeed, it is floridity at all---from the one discussed in the other thread. In particular, your Browne excerpt does not contain any obscure---or even archaic, remarkably enough---words. On the other hand you do get a strong visual impression of the author waving his arms agitatedly in the air as he shouts his piece at innocent passers-by.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 20 Oct 09 | 01:53PM by Jojo Lapin X.

Thank you for sharing this with us. I don't get the impression, as above, that he is like street preacher with his copia verborum. If one were to paraphrase the above quote into modern English, it would not be all too different than an excerpt from a Classics paper (at least from the quote above).

As far as esoteric studies goes, I think The Garden of Cyrus would be an interesting read particularly because his imagery reinforces his focus on the language of images via symbolism.

A few more selected examples of verbal "Browne-ian motion", just for fun:


1. Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it.

2. The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.

3. Whosoever enjoys not this life, I count him but an apparition, though he wear about him the sensible affections of flesh. In these moral acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily.

4. Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion snares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.

And, finally, a quotation that Donald Sidney-Fryer felt apt enough to use in his introduction to CAS's Poems in Prose:

5. Let thy Thoughts be of things which have not enterd into the Hearts of Beasts: Think of things long past, and long to come: Acquaint thy self with the Choragium of the Stars, and consider the vast expansion beyond them. Let Intellectual Tubes give thee a glance of things, which visive Organs reach not. Have a glimpse of incomprehensibles, and Thoughts of things, which Thoughts but tenderly touch.

BROWNE!!!

How pleasing, to see he had a thread of his own here, even if it didn't turn out to be a long one.

If you want to read a "novel" that might warm you up for Browne, get hold of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. It's been around a year since I read it for the second time, so it wouldn't take much to get me to take it up again.