Some time ago I recommended the private compilations and published musings, of David Cecil; and I find them an inexhaustible model of taste, the longer I live with them without apparent benefit. I especially admire his gentle shrewdness, in juxtaposing extracts of some experience of Neglect, beyond all alphabetical coincidence, with those of unredeemed Nonsense. Their correlation, naturally, is broader than his exquisite selection of evidence, but Cecil’s reticence in suggestion needs to be honored in any praise of his taste. One can refer what one may, to such a pool of refreshing perspective, without doubt of being welcome. In his selection from Tennyson, he might have left the question of category to any reader - but he didn’t -
Come not, when I am dead,
To drop thy foolish tears
upon my grave,
To trample round my fallen
head,
And vex the unhappy dust
thou wouldst not save.
There let the wind sweep
and the plover cry;
But thou, go by.
Child, if it were thine
error or thy crime
I care no longer, being
all unblest:
Wed whom thou wilt, but
I am sick of time,
And I desire to rest.
Pass on, weak heart, and
leave me where I lie:
Go by, go by.
Come not, when I am dead,
To drop thy foolish tears
upon my grave,
To trample round my fallen
head,
And vex the unhappy dust
thou wouldst not save.
There let the wind sweep
and the plover cry;
But thou, go by.
Child, if it were thine
error or thy crime
I care no longer, being
all unblest:
Wed whom thou wilt, but
I am sick of time,
And I desire to rest.
Pass on, weak heart, and
leave me where I lie:
Go by, go by.
Lord David Cecil
Library Looking-Glass
A Personal Anthology
Tennyson
Come not ..
1851
Harper & Row, 1975©
Peter Zumthor
Studio detail
Haldenstein, Switzerland
Le Corbusier
Les oiseaux
1953
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