![]() ![]() All its outlandish and scintillating mannerisms are just so many volutes and modillions, Solomonic columns and gilded cornices, quadrature and mirrored halls. Browne’s prose is a magnificent Baroque palace, by dizzying turns grandiose or lyrical, opulent or elegant, monstrous or precious, inordinate or harmonious, carelessly vast or pedantically exact-and always magnificent. One really would have to have a miserly spirit not to love both. Taken together, they ideally illustrate the two extremes of the great man’s voice: on the one hand, its glowing beauty and spacious sonority on the other, its anfractuous density and heedless flamboyance. ![]() And, however great the joy I take in either of these passages in isolation, it is as nothing compared to the idiot bliss I derive from their juxtaposition. The music of the one has haunted me for most of my life the gleeful perversity of the other has lost none of its power to make me laugh in nearly four decades. To my mind, each is in its own way a perfect, exquisitely faceted gem of English prose from an especially glorious literary epoch. And therefore having passed the day in sober labours and rationall enquiries of truth, wee are fayne to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherin the soberest heads have acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no better then folly and madnesse.Īnd the other is the final paragraph from the second chapter of the fifth book of the immense, glorious, and shamefully neglected miscellany Pseudodoxia Epidemica, entitled “Of the Picture of Dolphins”:Īnd thus also must that picture be taken of a Dolphin clasping an Anchor: that is, not really, as is by most conceived out of affection unto man, conveighing the Anchor unto the ground: but emblematically, according as Pierius hath expressed it, The swiftest animal conjoyned with that heavy body, implying that common moral, Festina lentè: and that celerity should always be contempered with cunctation. The day supplyeth us with truths, the night with fictions and falsehoods, which uncomfortably divide the natural account of our beings. A good part of our sleepes is peeced out with visions, and phantasticall objects wherin wee are confessedly deceaved. Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives. One is the opening paragraph from his essay “On Dreams”: There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful but two afford me particularly intense pleasure. ![]()
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