Shakspere, Personal RecollectionsJoyce, John A. (John Alexander)
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Shakspere, Personal Recollections
Joyce, John A. (John Alexander)
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Fiction
Extra wine was ordered, and then an improvised ballet girl jumped into the
middle of the wine room, with circus antics, champagne glasses in hand,
singing the praises of the great and only Garnier! Poor devil, he did not
know that my criticism was a double ender. Just as well.
I cannot exactly remember how I got to the hotel, but when William aroused
my latent energies the next morning, I felt as if I had been put through a
Kentucky corn sheller, or caught up in a Texas blizzard and blown into the
middle of Kansas.
William was, as usual, calm, polite, sober and dignified, and while he
touched the wine cup for sociability, in search of human hearts, I never
saw him intoxicated. He had a marvelous capacity of body and brain, and
like an earthly Jupiter he shone over the variegated satellites around him
with the force and brilliancy of the morning sun. He was so far above other
thinkers and writers that no one who knew him felt a pang of jealousy, for
they saw it was impossible to even twinkle in the heaven of his philosophy.
The day before leaving Paris we visited Versailles and wandered through its
pictured palaces, drinking in the historical milestones of the past. Here
lords, kings, queens, farmers, mechanics, shop keepers, sailors, soldiers,
robbers, murderers and beggars had appropriated in turn these royal halls
and stately gardens.
Riot and revolution swept over these memorials like a winter storm, and the
thunder and lightning strokes of civil and foreign troops had desolated the
works of art, genius and royalty.
Nations rise and fall like individuals, and a thousand or ten thousand
years of time are only a "tick" in the clock of destiny.
Early on the morning of the seventh of May, 1598, we went on board a light
double-oared galley, swung into the sparkling waters of the Seine, and
proceeded on our way to Rouen and Havre.
The morning sun sparkling on the tall spires and towers, the songs of the
watermen and gardeners, whirring ropes, flashing flags, blooming flowers,
green parks, forest vistas, shining cottages, grand mansions and lofty
castles, in the shimmering distance gave the suburbs of Paris a phase of
enchantment that lifted the soul of the beholder into the fairy realm of
dreamland; and as our jolly crew rowed away with rhythmic sweep we lay
under a purple awning, sheltered from the midday sun, gazing out on the
works of Dame Nature with entranced amazement.
William, in one of his periodical bursts of impromptu poetry, uttered these
lines on
_CREATION._
_The smallest grain of ocean sand,
Or continent of mountain land,
With all the stars and suns we see
Are emblems of eternity._
_God reigns in everything he made--
In man, in beast, in hill and glade;
In sum and substance of all birth;
Component parts of Heaven and Earth._
_The moving, ceaseless vital air
Is managed by Almighty care,
And from the center to the rim,
All creatures live and die in Him._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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