Horae subsecivae / by Dr. John Brown, with an introduction by Austin Dobson.

  • John Brown
Date:
[1907]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Horae subsecivae / by Dr. John Brown, with an introduction by Austin Dobson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    portrait, ‘ It is certainly like, but it is much better- looking ’ ; and you might well reply, as did the painter, ‘ It is the truth, told lovingly ’—and all the more true that it is so told. You have, indeed, been enabled to speak the truth, or as the Greek has it, dXijdeveLv iv dyoTTT]—to truth it in love. I have over and over again sat down to try and do what I promised and wished—to give some faint ex- pression of my father’s life ; not of what he did or said or wrote—^not even of what he was as a man of God and a public teacher; but what he was in his essential nature—what he would have been had he been anything else than what he was, or had lived a thousand years ago. Sometimes I have this so vividly in my mind that I think I have only to sit down and write it off, and to do it to the quick. ‘ The idea of his life,’ what he was as a whole, what was his self, all his days, would,—to go on with words which not time or custom can ever wither or make stale,— Sweetly creep Into my study of imagination ; And every lovely organ of his life Would come apparelled in more precious habit— More moving delicate, and full of life. Into the eye and prospect of my soul. Than when he lived indeed; as if the sacredness of death and the bloom of eternity were on it; or as you may have seen in an untroubled lake, the heaven reflected with its clouds, brighter, purer, more exquisite than itself ; but when you try to put this into words, to detain yourself over it, it is by this very act disturbed, broken and bedimmed, and soon vanishes away, as would the imaged heavens in the lake, if a pebfae were cast into it, or a breath of wind stirred its face. The very anxiety to transfer it, as it looked out of the clear darkness of the past, makes the image grow dim and disappear. Every one whose thoughts are not seldom with the
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