William Williams

“ Williams gave considerable assistance to John Brickdale Blakeway in his ‘Sheriffs of Shropshire’ and ‘History of Shrewsbury,’ and to Archdeacon Joseph Plymley in his ‘Agricultural Survey of Shropshire.’ During the latter years of his life Williams discontinued his antiquarian pursuits, and devoted himself entirely to his parochial duties. ”

“ In early life his parents removed to Wem in Shropshire. There he was educated, and he was articled on 17 Feb. 1806 to an attorney there. After a residence in Liverpool from 1811 to 1815, he was admitted an attorney on 23 Jan. 1816, and commenced practice in Shrewsbury. On 31 Aug. 1819 he was admitted a burgess.
Williams had from childhood deep religious impressions. He became a member of the congregational church at Wem in the autumn of 1809, and began to form a large collection of manuscripts by the Henrys and other theologians of their school. He soon devoted his leisure to writing. ”

“ That harvest
that shall be your advent—
thrusting up through the grass,
up under the weeds
answering me,
that shall be satisfying!
The light shall leap and snap
that day as with a million lashes! ”

“ This intimate association with the tractarians brought forth fruit in the election for the professorship of poetry at Oxford in 1841–2. Keble was retiring from the post, and Williams, already recognised as a genuine poet, was generally considered his successor. James Garbett [q. v.] , a man of distinction at the university but a student guiltless of poetry, was nominated in opposition. ”

“ Who holds Lancelot to have been a morose fellow,
Dolefully brooding over the events which had naturally to follow
The high time of his deed with Guinevere.
He has a sick historical sight, if I judge rightly,
To believe any such thing as that ever occurred.
But, by the god of blood, what else is it that has deterred
Us all from an out and out defiance of fear
But this same perdamnable miserliness,
Which cries about our necks how we shall have less and less
Than we have now if we spend too wantonly? ”

“ The family lived in Southampton Street, Bloomsbury Square, London, and Williams's early years were spent under the instruction of the Rev. Mr. Polehampton of Eton and King's College. When Polehampton moved to Worplesdon in Surrey his pupils followed him. From 1817 Williams was at Harrow, where he became conspicuous for his skill in Latin verse, and on 7 June 1821 he matriculated from Trinity College, Oxford. From 3 June 1822 to 1831 he held a scholarship on that foundation, but from the first he lived much among the men at Oriel College. ”

“ In Holland at daybreak, of a fine spring morning, one sees the housemaids beating rugs before the small houses of such a city as Amsterdam, sweeping, scrubbing the low entry steps and polishing doorbells and doorknobs. By night perhaps there will be an old woman with a girl on her arm, histing and whistling across a deserted canal to some late loiterer trudging aimlessly on beneath the gas lamps. ”

“ There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose-red grasses and you—in your apron running to catch—say it seems to you to be your son. ”

“ You see, when the wheel’s just at the up turn it glimpses horizon, zenith, all in a burst, the pull of the earth shaken off, a scatter of fragments, significance in a burst of water striking up from the base of a fountain. ”

“ Leaves are beginning to fall upon the long grass. Their cold perfume raises the anticipation of sensational revolutions in my unsettled life. Violence has begotten peace, peace has fluttered away in agitation. ”

“ What is it in the stilled face of an old mender-man and winter not far off and a darky parts his wool, and wenches wear of a Sunday? It’s a sparrow with a crumb in his beak dodging wheels and clouds crossing two ways. ”

“ Sacred bulls—dragons
in embossed brickwork
marching—in four tiers—
along the sacred way to
Nebuchadnezzar's throne hall!
They shine in the sun,
they that have been marching—
marching under the dust of
ten thousand dirt years. ”

“ One might rest here time without end, watch out his stretch and see no other bending than spring to autumn, winter to summer and earth turning into leaves and leaves into earth and—how restful these long beet rows—the caress of the low clouds—the river lapping at the reeds. ”

“ Only thou art my Lady.
Where thousand the freshets are crowded like peasants to a fair;
Clear skinned, wild from seclusion,
They jostle white armed down the tent-bordered thoroughfare
Praising my Lady. ”

“ The red huckleberry bushes running miraculously along the ground among the trees everywhere, except where the land’s tilled, these keep her from that tiredness the earth’s touch lays up under the soles of feet. She runs beyond the wood follows the swiftest along the roads laughing among the birch clusters her face in the yellow leaves the curls before her eyes her mouth half open. ”

“ Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting. ”

“ The odor of the poor farmer’s fried supper is mixing with the smell of the hemlocks, mist is in the valley hugging the ground and over Parsippany—where an oldish man leans talking to a young woman—the moon is swinging from its star. ”

“ Había sido un arbusto desmedrado que prolonga sus filamentos hasta encontrar el humus necesario en una tierra nueva. Y cómo me nutría! Me nutría con la beatitud con que las hojas trémulas de clorófila se extienden al sol; con la beatitud con que una raíz encuentra un cadáver en descompositión; con la beatitud con que los convalecientes dan sus pasos vacilantes en las mañanas de primavera, bañadas de luz ”

“ The rose-tree will have its donor
even though he give stingily.
The gift of some endures
ten years, the gift of some twenty
and the gift of some for the time a
great house rots and is torn down.
Some give for a thousand years to men of
one face, some for a thousand
to all men and some few to all men
while granite holds an edge against
the weather. ”

“ Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rises: this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fulness. It is its own summer, of its leaves as they scrape on the smooth ground it must build its perfection. ”

“ Live as they will together a husband and wife give each other many a sidelong glance at unlikely moments. Each watches the other out of the tail of his eye. Always it seems some drunkeness is waiting to unite them. ”

“ And these the orange-trees, in blossom—no need
to tell with this weight of perfume in the air.
If it were not so dark in this shed one could better
see the white.
It is that very perfume
has drawn the darkness down among the leaves. ”

“ Wine clear the sky is and the stars no bigger than sparks! Wait for me and next winter we’ll build a fire and shake up twists of sparks out of it and you shall see yourself in the ashes, young—as you were one time. ”

“ There are days when leaves have knife’s edges and one sees only eye-pupils, fixes every catchpenny in a shop window and every wire against the sky but—goes puzzled from vista to vista in his own house staring under beds for God knows what all. ”

“ Virtue is not to be packed in a bag and carried off to the rag mill. Perversions are righted and the upright are reversed, then the stream takes a bend upon itself and the meaning turns a livid purple and drops down in a whirlpool without so much as fraying a single fibre. ”

“ After the youth of all cities, drunk
With the sight of thy archness! All the youth
That come to you, you having the knowledge
Rather than to those uninitiate—
To you, marvelous old queen, give me always
A new marriage—”
⁠But she laughed loudly—
“A new grip upon those garments that brushed me
In days gone by on beach, lawn, and in forest! ”

“ It was in this sphere, where the personal is grafted on the political, that Clubfoot reigned supreme ... here and in another sphere, where German William is not only monarch, but also a very ordinary man.
"There are phases in every man's life, Okewood, which hardly bear the light of day. In an autocracy, however, such phases are generally inextricably entangled with political questions. It was in these dark places that Clubfoot flourished ... ”

“ It is that very perfume
has drawn the darkness down among the leaves.
Do I speak clearly enough?
It is this darkness reveals that which darkness alone
loosens and sets spinning on waxen wings—
not the touch of a finger-tip, not the motion
of a sigh. A too heavy sweetness proves
its own caretaker.
And here are the orchids!
And here are the orchids! Never having seen
such gaiety I will read these flowers for you:
This is an odd January, died—in Villon's time.
Snow, this is and this the stain of a violet
grew in that place the spring that foresaw its own doom. ”

“ Bent as you are from straining
against the bitter horizontals of
a north wind,—there below you
how easily the long yellow notes
of poplars flow upward in a descending
scale, each note secure in its own
posture—singularly woven.
All voices are blent willingly
against the heaving contra-bass
of the dark but you alone
warp yourself passionately to one side
in your eagerness. ”

“ Go to sleep to the lunge between foam-crests,
refuse churned in the recoil. Food! Food!
Offal! Offal! that holds them in the air, wave-white
for the one purpose, feather upon feather, the wild
chill in their eyes, the hoarseness in their voices—
sleep, sleep....
Gentlefooted crowds are treading out your lullaby.
Their arms nudge, they brush shoulders,
hitch this way then that, mass and surge at the crossings—
lullaby, lullaby! ”

“ Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow!
It is not a color.
It is summer!
It is the wind on a willow,
the lap of waves, the shadow
under a bush, a bird, a bluebird,
three herons, a dead hawk
rotting on a pole—
Clear yellow! ”

“ Thinking to build in the young the foundations of knowledge they let slip their minds that the blocks are of grey mist bedded upon the wind. Those who will taste of the wind himself have a mark in their eyes by virtue of which they bring their masters to nothing. ”

“ Weave away, dead fingers, the darkies are dancing in Mayaguez—all but one with the sore heel and sugar cane will soon be high enough to romp through. Haia! leading over the ditches, with your skirts flying and the devil in the wind back of you—no one else. Weave away and the bitter tongue of an old woman is eating, eating, eating venomous words with thirty years mould on them and all shall be eaten back to honeymoon’s end. ”

“ There is neither beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will. Of the air of the coldest room it will seem to build the hottest passions. Mozart would dance with his wife, whistling his own tune to keep the cold away and Villon ceased to write upon his Petit Testament only when the ink was frozen. But men in the direst poverty of the imagination buy finery and indulge in extravagant moods in order to piece out their lack with other matter. ”

“ After an illness of eight months Williams died in London on 12 July 1755.
Williams was the author of: 1. 'The Mariners Compass Compleated,' in two parts; describing the variations of the magnetic needle at places whose true latitude or longitude is certainly known, 1745. Part i. had been previously issued, with a different title-page, as by Z. W. in 1740. 2. 'A True Narrative of certain Circumstances relating to Zachariah Williams in the Charterhouse,' 1749. 3. ”

“ William Bateson, the distinguished English biologist, said, “It is impossible for scientists longer to agree with Darwin’s theory of the origin of species. No explanation whatever has been offered to account for the fact that, after forty years, no evidence has been discovered to verify his genesis of species.” ”

“ The complaints of an old man dying piecemeal are starling chirrups. Coughs go singing on springtime paths across a field; corruption picks strawberries and slow warping of the mind, blacking the deadly walls—counted and recounted—rolls in the grass and shouts ecstatically. ”

“ The wild-fowl police whistles,
the enraged roar of the traffic, machine shrieks:
it is all to put you to sleep,
to soften your limbs in relaxed postures,
and that your head slip sidewise, and your hair loosen
and fall over your eyes and over your mouth,
brushing your lips wistfully that you may dream,
sleep and dream—
A black fungus springs out about lonely church doors—
sleep, sleep. ”

“ Granite over flesh: who will deny
its advantages?
Your death?—water
spilled upon the ground—
though water will mount again into rose-leaves—
but you?—would hold life still,
even as a memory, when it is over.
Benevolence is rare. ”

“ March,
you remind me of
the pyramids, our pyramids—
stript of the polished stone
that used to guard them!
March, you are like Fra Angelico
at Fiesole, painting on plaster!
March,
you are like a band of
young poets that have not learned
the blessedness of warmth
(or have forgotten it) . ”

“ There is something strange in the casual way in which Orderic (767 A) brings in so mighty an ally; “Guillelmus rex cum Guillelmo duce Pictavensium, ductu Almarici juvenis, et Nivardi de Septoculo, contra Montemfortem et Sparlonem maximam multitudinem duxit, circumjacentem provinciam devastavit.” The bargain between the two Williams, of which this was surely an instalment, comes later, 780 B.
[613] See Will. Malms. v. 439.
[614] Had either William ever done personal homage to Philip? There is no sign of it in the case of William of England.
[615] Ord. Vit. 767 A. See note 1 on p. 250. ”