Another uneventful day in The Guide to Reading: The Pocket University Volume XXIII (1925). Enjoy the quiet today because it’s about to get real.

Guide to Daily Reading 4/13/20

• Burns’ “To a Mountain Daisy”
• Lamb’s “Imperfect Sympathies“

To a Mountain Daisy On Turning One Down with the Plow, in April, 1786

Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flow'r,
Thou's met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
            Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my pow'r,
            Thou bonie gem.
Alas! it's no thy neibor sweet,
The bonie lark, companion meet,
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet
            Wi' spreck'd breast,
When upward-springing, blythe, to greet
            The purpling east.

Read the whole thing here.

Published in Burns’ first volume of poetry, The Kilmarnock Burns. Six hundred and twelve copies “first appeared on the 31st day of July, 1786. … The entire edition was practically sold out in little more than a month after its publication” (The Story of Kilmarnock Burns, John D. Ross, 1933).

I just love crappy old books about crappy old books!

Imperfect Sympathies by Charles Lamb, first published in London Magazine, August, 1821.

“I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathiseth with all things; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in anything. Those national repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch.”—Religio Medici.

THAT the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences; in whose categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of the actual; should have overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, that in the genus of animals he should have condescended to distinguish that species at all. For myself—earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities—

“Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky,”

I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste; or when once it becomes indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices—made up of likings and dislikings—the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally. The more purely English word that expresses sympathy will better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I cannot like all people alike.

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, …

Full essay here. And remember! Daily Readings can be read in 15-30 minutes.

Stay well and keep reading!