'We Hear Life Murmur, or See It Glisten'

“What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us!” 

It’s customary and rather old-fashioned to say that readers are the truest book critics. Without them, a book remains dead on the vine. No special training, no advanced degrees, are required. James Russell Lowell further abstracts that truth by substituting “Time.” He means successive generations of common readers. The passage is drawn from “Library of Old Authors,” a review-essay collected in My Study Windows (1871). The title is borrowed from the reprint series published between 1856 and 1864 by the English bookseller and bibliographer John Russell Smith (1810–1894). Lowell writes:

 

“A choice of old authors should be a florilegium, and not a botanist’s hortus siccus, to which grasses are as important as the single shy blossom of a summer.”

 

Lowell refers to the literary genre known as the florilegium or bouquet. From the Latin for “flower gathering,” it’s a literal translation of ἀνθολόγιον, “anthology,” as in the OED’s definition of florilegium: “A collection of the flowers of literature, an anthology.” Hortus siccus means “dried garden,” a herbarium – that is, a collection of dead botanical specimens. The etymology supplies a useful metaphor.

 

I bring this up because today is June 1, and every year on this date I remember the lines from Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal” (1848) I had to memorize in grade school:

 

“And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days;

Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,

And over it softly her warm ear lays;

Whether we look, or whether we listen,

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten.”

 

Those six lines are part of my living florilegium. I learned them almost sixty years ago. Lowell was one of the Fireside Poets, along with Bryant, Holmes, Longfellow and Whittier. They are not much read today (though Longfellow in particular is often a fine poet) but they formed much of the canon of American poetry when I was a kid. Those six lines “which Time has criticised for us” live in me, and not just in memory, even though I’ve never had much interest in the Arthurian legend and never read all of “The Vision of Sir Launfal.”