Auld Lang Syne

“ Such a friendship, that through it we love places and seasons; for as bright bodies emit rays at a distance, and flowers drop their sweet leaves on the ground around them, so friends impart favor even to the places where they dwell. With friends even poverty is pleasant. Words cannot express the joy which a friend imparts; they only can know who have experienced. A friend is dearer than the light of heaven, for it would be better for us that the sun were extinguished than that we should be without friends. ”

“ For auld lang syne, my dear
For auld lang syne;
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne. ”

“ Life to be rich and fertile must be reinforced with friendship. It is the sap that preserves from blight and withering; it is the sunshine that beckons on the blossoming and fruitage; it is the starlight dew that perfumes life with sweetness and besprinkles it with splendor; it is the music-tide that sweeps the soul, scattering treasures; it is the victorious and blessed leader of integrity's forlorn hope; it is the potent alchemy that transmutes failure into success; it is the hidden manna that nourishes when all other sustenance fails ”

“ I was quite satisfied with that ideal India which I had built up for myself, whether from their books or from those who had come to see me at Oxford. If my India, as I am often told, is an ideal India, is it more so than Greece as seen through the poems of Homer, or Italy as seen through the verses of Virgil? What is ideal is not necessarily unreal, it is only like a landscape seen in sunshine. Look at a landscape on a brilliant summer’s day bathed in light and verdure, and again on a bleak day of March with its bitter winds and cloudy sky. ”

“ They strove to pierce through the dark roof of their forests, to travel to the distant sources of their rivers, and to transcend even the snowy peaks of the Himâlaya Mountains. Their hearts would never forget the life that lay behind them, and their minds were for ever set on the life that was to come. ”

“ Auld Lang Syne Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? ”

“ Royalty has its dangers, and mankind has suffered much from kings and emperors, but the greatness of England during the last sixty years has chiefly been due to the mutual esteem and love of her people and their sovereign. The world will know henceforth one at least of the secret springs of England’s health and wealth and strength—namely, the true sympathy that for 288years has knitted ruler and ruled together. England has had great ministers and counsellors, but ask those ministers, who for years has been their truest and most trusted counsellor, and they will not hesitate in their answer. ”

“ And England is not only the greatest, it is also the freest, country in the world, so free that even republics may well envy it its fresh and pure air; and yet was there ever among the vast masses, rich and poor, a more universal outburst of hearty loyalty to the Throne, of personal love of the sovereign, than in the days of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee? ”

“ It is a pleasure to him, though often a sad pleasure, to see once more what he has seen before, to live the old time over again, to look once more at dear faces, once so full of love and life, to feel the touch of a vanished hand, and hear a voice that is still. ”

“ No wonder that England, celebrating the Sixty-years’ Jubilee of her Sovereign, should have roused the admiration—and it may be, the envy also—of other nations. Let us hope that the admiration, so ungrudgingly bestowed, may last, and that the envy, if any, may pass away. “Viel Ehr, viel Feind” is as true here as elsewhere. Let other nations blame and criticise, it is the highest compliment they can pay. But let them ponder what Europe would have been without England, what the world would have been without the sceptre of the wise and good Queen Victoria. ”

“ Whenever I pay a visit to Dessau I find the town more and more enlarged and much improved. The old lamps that swung across the streets are gone, the gurgoyles frown no longer on large red and green umbrellas; there are gas lamps, and there are waterworks, and cabs, and tramways. The grass is no longer allowed to grow in the chinks of the pavement. The old Duke is gone, and the old people whom I knew as a boy are gone too. The wild boars are still there, but they are no longer allowed to break out of bounds. ”

“ But the world does not recognise a poet of one poem, or even of ten or twenty. In order to be a poet a man must produce hundreds of poems, volume after volume, good, bad, and indifferent. Nor is there here anything like the survival of the fittest. Although ever so many of Schiller’s or Goethe’s poems have become old and antiquated—few will deny this—yet no one is satisfied with a selection of the best, few people would ever agree as to which are the best. ”

“ SHE was a handsome, middle-aged woman, with prematurely white hair, and carried herself with a proud self-reliance that was accentuated by the firm contour of her jaw. So much the first glance would have shown you, the second would have revealed eyes softened by tears, a mouth made flexible and human by experience, and if you happen to be a woman, you would have noted her exquisite, tailor-made gown and the richness of her sable collar.
She entered the cable car at Tenth street with the uneasy step of one unaccustomed to such modes of conveyance. ”

“ But Kingsley and Froude soon became my intimate friends.
If I call Froude a poet it is because, as I explained before, I do not consider rhyme as essential to poetry. But for really poetical power, for power of description, of making the facts of history alive, of laying bare the deepest thoughts of men and the most mysterious feelings of women, there was no poet or historian of our age who came near him. ”

“ He sat down and played first of all Liszt’s Hungarian Melody, and then one variation after another, so that no one but Liszt himself could have told the difference. We all trembled lest Liszt should be offended, for Mendelssohn could not keep himself from slightly imitating Liszt’s movements and raptures. However, Mendelssohn managed never to offend man, woman, or child. Liszt laughed and applauded, and admitted that no one, not he himself, could have performed such a bravura. ”

“ They all have something to imitate which is brought to us by the senses. But what does music imitate? Not the notes of the lark, nor the roar of the sea; they cannot be imitated, and if they are, it is but a caricature. ”

“ We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun ’till dine ;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne. ”

“ I I am the son of a poet, and I have tried very hard all my life not to be a poet myself, if poet means a man who tries to make his thoughts dance gracefully in the chains of metre and rhyme. In my own very prosaic work I have had to suffer all my life from suppressed poetry, as one suffers from suppressed gout. Poets will, no doubt, protest most emphatically against so low a view of their art. They assure us that they never feel their chains, and that they are perfectly free in giving expression to their thoughts in rhyme and metre. ”

“ A small, square man, with greyish hair flowing down to his shoulders, his black eyes full of fire, and sometimes of fury. He was very fond of his glass of wine, which had given to his whole face, and particularly to his nose, a glowing ruddy complexion. He brooked no opposition from anybody, and he was the terror of all the young musicians who showed themselves at Dessau. His orchestra had such a reputation at that time that some of the greatest celebrities considered it an honour either to have their compositions performed or to be allowed to sing or play at his concerts. ”

“ A quiet dinner with a few friends is pleasant enough, and a certain amount of social friction may even be useful in keeping us from rusting; nay, a casual collision with a kindred spirit may sometimes call forth sparks which can be turned into light and heat. But to dress, to drive a few miles, then to be set down, possibly, between two strangers who have little to say and much to ask, and who, if ill-luck will have it, may not even be beautiful or charming, is a torture to which men like Browning and M. Arnold ought never to have submitted. ”

“ In the meantime, to speak of commercial interests only, how much has England lost by her unwillingness to incur an expense which other countries have readily incurred, which the people of England have a right to demand, and which would not have amounted to anything like the cost of a single man-of-war! ”

“ Players now seem to think of themselves only, not of the musical poets whose works they are to render. Mendelssohn, Clara Wieck (Madame Schumann) even Moscheles and Hummel acted as faithful interpreters. On listening to them, exquisite as their execution was, one thought far more of what they played than how they played. That time is gone, and no one has now, or will ever have again, the courage to bring it back. If one wants to enjoy a sonata of Haydn one has to play it oneself or hum it, because the old fingers will not do their work any longer. ”

“ Royalty has proved its right to exist, and that under the sceptre of a Queen who, if compared to other sovereigns, will be famous not only for much that she has done, but also for much that she has not done. Constitutional government has proved its superiority over any form of government by the triumph on 22nd June.
If the people have been loyal to the Queen, how loyal has the Queen been to her people; if her subjects have shared her joys and sorrows, how warmly has she taken the sufferings of her people to heart. ”

“ I have enjoyed music until very late in life when I began to feel satisfied, and would much rather hum a symphony to myself than hear it played, often not half so well as I remembered it at Dessau, at the Gewandhaus Concerts at Leipzig, and at the marvellous Conservatoire Concerts in Paris. ”

“ My first acquaintance with royalty was at Dessau, my native town. Much has been written to ridicule the small German princes and their small Courts. And it cannot be denied that the etiquette kept up by the courtiers, and the nobility, in some of the small capitals of Germany is ludicrous in the extreme. But there is in the sovereigns themselves an inherited dignity, a sentiment of noblesse oblige, which demands respect. The reigning Duke of Anhalt-Dessau was to us boys a being by himself, and no wonder. ”

“ Goethe’s name, no 142doubt, is always a pillar of strength, but there is even now a very great part of Goethe’s “Collected Works” in thirty volumes that is no longer a stay, but is passé, and seldom read by any one, except by the historian. Poetry may act as a powerful preservative, and it is wonderful how much pleasure we may derive from thought mummified in verse. But in the end it is thought in its ever-changing life that forms the real stay, and it matters little whether that thought speaks to us in marble, or in music, in hexameters, in blank verse, or even in prose. ”

“ At that time my English was still very crumbly; there was no idea of my staying on in England, still less of my ever becoming a professor at Oxford.
Thackeray’s novels were a great delight to me then, and some have remained so for life. Still, there is a fashion in all things, in literature quite as much as in music, and when lately reading “The Newcomes” I was surprised at the meagreness of the dialogue, the very dialogues for which we felt so impatient from month to month when the book first came out in numbers. ”

“ The melodies of Schubert were chosen, not from the Prater, but from another world.
For educational purposes music is invaluable. It softens the young barbarian, it makes him use his fingers deftly, it lifts him up, it brings him messages from another world, it makes him feel the charm of harmony and beauty. There is no doubt an eternal harmony that pervades every kind of music, and there are the endless varieties of music, some so strange that they seem hardly to deserve to be called a gift of the Muses. ”

“ To have known such men as Tennyson and Browning is indeed a rare fortune. It helps us in two ways. We are preserved from extravagant admiration, which is always stupid; and, on the other hand, we can enjoy even insignificant verses of theirs, as coming from our friends and lighting up some corner of their character. There are cases where personal acquaintance with the poets actually spoils our taste for their poetry, which we might otherwise have enjoyed; and to imagine that one knows a poet better because one has once shaken hands with him, is a fatal mistake. ”

“ He told me the name of the tailor for whom he had been working in Oxford, and I received the most satisfactory account both from his employer and from the men with whom he had been working.
“Why do you come to see me?” he said again and again. “No one has ever been kind to me. I want to die; I have nothing to care for in this world. The few things that belong to me I wish to leave to the poor servant girl in the house where I have last been at work, the little money in my purse may go to the Infirmary. I know no one else; no one cares for me, or has ever cared for me.” ”

“ It seems to me that there is only one thing to be done, namely, to give up, every one of us, whatever quotum of our income we think right, and to hand it over to such societies as take the trouble to find out for us some not quite undeserving poor. ”

“ I think most men’s conception of distance is very much a creature of maps—which make Crim Tartary and England not more than a foot apart, so that the feat of the old rhyme—“to dance out of Ireland into France,” looks easy. They seem to think that the shifting of habitation was accomplished like a modern journey by rail, and that the emigrants wouldn’t need tools by the way or would buy them at the nearest shop after their arrival. There is nothing the ignorant and the poor cling to so tenaciously as their familiar household utensils. ”