Watched the "Age of Innocence" this morning...the ballroom scene...and Archer's facial expressions...rewind, begin again...rewind, begin again. There is a pausing point in the story where we see the open page within, "The House of Life"...
Supreme Surrender by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
To all the spirits of Love that wander by
Along his love-sown harvest-field of sleep
My lady lies apparent; and the deep
Calls to the deep; and no man sees but I.
The bliss so long afar, at length so nigh,
Rests there attained. Methinks proud Love must weep
When Fate's control doth from his harvest reap
The sacred hour for which the years did sigh.
First touched, the hand now warm around my neck
Taught memory long to mock desire: and lo!
Across my breast the abandoned hair doth flow,
Where one shorn tress long stirred the longing ache:
And next the heart that trembled for its sake
Lies the queen-heart in sovereign overthrow.
There is a book I fell in love with during college titled, "The Brotherhood of Letters". Snippets and phrases that sang to me. My closest friend in the universe photocopied the book and I have carried it through every move. Re-read it now and again in full and reference its existence in my head when I look through the bookshelves. Holmes, Churchill (not the Winston--the other Winston), Marvel, Landor and a few others...Rees would be at home with these others...someday he shall come.
"...spent a certain evening together, discoursing on subjects of mutual interest, and what scope we have for conjecture as to how their hidden souls leaped out to meet each other. The freed imagination lingers over such a meeting for days and seasons. We live again for ourselves, the hours they this lived, or should have lived, during that interview; we hear again the words they spoke, or should have spoken; and these help to make for us a life, nay, a world, sacred and personal and secluded."
"...something of hero-worship felt by Thackeray when he said: 'I should like to have been Shakespeare's shoe-black, just to have worshipped him, to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet serene face.' . . . It does not matter how much superior to the worshipper the hero may be: the man who worships cannot fail to feel himself, in a certain sense, of kin to the object of his adoration. The mere act of worship has in itself and uplifting and refining influence of no mean extent."
"In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and everything directly or indirectly tends."
"At one end of the table sat Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced--a most agreeable rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always pleasant to look--whose silence was better than many another man's conversations."