Status Updates From The Rosemary Tree

The flowers about him, many-colored beneath the sparkle of the dew, the branches misted with green and swaying in the morning wind, the rose-tinted sky of this April morning, were the faint reflection of a glory he had known and possessed still as seed in the darkness of the soul. He would know it again when the seed had come to flower.

Above all, she loved the dawn skies with their alternations of bright beauty, flaming so quickly to the penultimate splendor, then passing from glory to glory until the colors were lost in the splendor if the full day. Her eyes could never seem to catch the moment of change; in the span of a breath one glory had passed and another was passing and she could not halt the moments as they came...

"Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen;
Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green,
Goddess, allow this aged man his right,
To be your beadsman now, that was your knight."

"They were striking down through the fields to the River. The tide was in and the River brimming with light. A mist of gold lay upon the blue distances and faintly veiled the fresh green of the trees beyond the river. There was not a breath of wind. The chorus of bird song rose to them with a touch of solemnity and the shadows lay long upon the grass."

"Now, angels and ministers of light," murmured Michael desperately below his breath, "if it be that you exist at all in contraposition to the terrestrial furies, be with me now and grant my hand and eye and resolution that perfect co-ordination which shall project this pig - in through the front door?" he asked Miss Wentworth in interpolation.
...

"Through the front door," whispered Michael. "Amen."

"Beauty awakened such intolerable longing that people often shut their eyes to it, unaware that the longing was the greatest treasure that they had, their very lifeline, uniting the country of their lost innocence with the heavenly country for which their sails were set."

"Fool," she said to herself. "It's the tooth. The world seems so abominably wicked when a tooth is still in and so dreadfully pathetic when a tooth's just out. I expect the only really balanced people are the people with dentures." 😂

"He on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise."

"Plainly I cannot glose,
Ye be, as I divine,
The pretty primerose,
The goodly columbine."

"For honor travels in a strait so narrow...keep then the path."

"Seeds blow into crannies in the rock, dead-looking brown things hardly larger than grains of dust, and then unbelievably flower into snapdragon and valerian. It was miraculous how such gay things could grow in the rock. And if she stayed here much longer it would be miraculous if there was any lunch."
I love reading about Winkle's dream world.

"Nerves," thought Harriet, "We never had them when I was young. Tinned food and aeroplanes. Strawberries at Christmas and travelling faster than sound. Flying in the face of Providence don't give the stomach a chance. Dear God, why can't they laugh at each other? There's a yaffingale laughing." She folded her hands under her rug. "Dear God, why can't they let that laughing bird teach them a bit of sense?"

"In his eagerness he hardly stopped to wonder, as he normally did whenever he entered his home, why the builders of Victorian vicarages had so concentrated upon darkness, draughts and unwanted space."

"He took off his coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves, lifted up to Almighty God the magnitude of his failure and the triviality of his task, and applied himself to the latter."

Well, that chapter wasn't as good as the others...🤢

"Bringing up children, she thought, was like pouring ginger beer into a tumbler. All went well up to a certain point, and then it all frothed over the top. It was only Pat, so far. Margary was not the frothy type and she still had her Winkle down at the bottom of the tumbler." 🤣🤣🤣

"My thought are going after her, and it is that way my soul would follow her, lightly, and airily, and happily, and I would be rid of all my great troubles."