`A Whole Day With Delight'

I bought The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne in the Cleveland bookstore where I worked in April of 1975. It’s a fat yellow paperback, part of the Anchor Seventeenth-Century Series, and includes all the major works and selections from the letters and minor essays – 646 pages and a cover designed by Leonard Baskin for $3.95. Given my frequency of use, it may be the best book bargain of my life.

As I reread Religio Medici, other prose seems thin and watery. We’re told we use but a fraction of our brains, and Browne convinces me we use but a fraction of our gift for language. While you and I may wonder at nature’s bottomless capacity for variation, Browne writes:

“It is the common wonder of all men, how, among so many millions of faces, there should be none alike: now, contrary, I wonder as much how there should be any. He that shall consider how many thousand several words have been carelessly and without study composed out of twenty-four letters; withal, how many hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabrick of one man; shall easily find that this variety is necessary: and it will be very hard that they shall so concur as to make one portrait like another.”

We might say nature possesses pattern and design, parts correspond to other parts and to wholes. Browne writes:

“I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of a horse. It is my temper, & I like it the better, to affect all harmony, and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.”

We can find comedy in Browne’s words, too. He married Dorothy Mileham in 1641, and the couple had 12 children in 18 years, but Browne writes:

“I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.”

Browne's nature, in a century of civil and religious strife, was remarkably tolerant and big-spirited:

“I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few dayes I should dissent my selfe: I have no Genius to disputes in Religion, and have often thought it wisedome to decline them…”

A physician and a scientist of sorts, Browne sustained a sense of awe before creation. Even in the midst of depravity he felt awe. He never lost his appreciation for what Marianne Moore called “life’s faulty excellence.”

The University of Chicago, I see, maintains a useful and interesting Browne site.

ADDENDUM: Dave Lull passes along this piece from The Spectator on Browne the word-coiner:

"According to Madan’s list, the most prolific neologist was Sir Thomas Browne. He is credited with inventing precarious, insecurity, medical, literary, electricity, hallucination, antediluvian and incontrovertible. That is a formidable achievement, if true."