Running a Quotation to Earth

— There are some compensations for a defective memory, and in the verification of an elusive quotation there is a zest which must be unknown to those who can turn immediately to volume and page when a fragment of verse comes into their mind. The pleasure may be worth describing, and the mild psychological interest which possibly attaches to the mental process may help the description out with those who would otherwise have short patience with the deplorable ignorance implied.

Part of a line of poetry often appears in my mind in connection with a certain allied train of thought. It may be, probably is, without proper beginning or ending, and commonly has enough words transposed to untune its measure and disfigure its beauty. But there it is, even in its fragmentary and perverted condition expressing the thought far better than any words of my own, and giving rise to a strong wish to find it in its correct and complete form and in its full context. If there were nothing more than this, the hunt for it among the poets would be a search in absolute darkness, with only chance for a guide, and with ultimate success a highly improbable outcome. The fragment, however, does not stand alone. There is hanging to it an alluring vista of associations guiding back with fascinating suggestiveness, but tantalizing vagueness, to the abode from which the random thought had seized it. Either the metre, however imperfect, sets in vibration with its music all the snatches of similar measure lying in the recesses of the memory ; or it is the phrasing, which bears the mark of kinship with other children of the same mind, or, in more remote resemblance, with its cousins of the same epoch ; or it may be the current of the thought, which sets in the familiar and limited trend of some one of the minor poets. Or perhaps the suggestion is some purely mechanical one, some dim vision of the line as it stands in its place on a half-familiar page of a well-known volume, some glimpse of its neighbors with whom in entirely unessential association it brushes elbows in a collection of the poets ; or it wears a semblance given it by a casual judgment passed on it in book or conversation. But all these suggestions and associations are so blended as to lose their individuality, and make only a vanishing composite, which loses its features altogether if we look too fixedly, and is only an uncertain clue to the abiding - place of the line which has called it up. Of course Bartlett would generally settle the matter at once ; but to have recourse to him would be as tame as to shoot a deer while the guide holds his tail. In a search of this kind one can put up with assistance from those who start in as incomplete knowledge as one’s self ; but it is better to read through whole volumes of poetry than to resort to the mechanical means of looking up the solution in a book of quotations.

“ Benefits forgot ” seemed unmistakably Shakespearean, both from the character of the phrase and the other indefinable associations which, however I looked at them, led back only to the great dramatist. The sonnets came first to mind, but the

failed to show “benefits forgot” among the particular ills of the world from which he would just then be gone ; and though the wavering divining-rod of the associations seemed still to point to the sonnets, a prolonged search among them — as those who are now marveling at my ignorance could have told me at the outset was of no avail. Next came the plays ; and here, too, the most reliable guide seemed to be the suggested context, though the scent grew cold and the chase lagged. Measure for Measure, with its

was discouraging. Hamlet, with the “ unweeded garden ” and the “ whips and scorns of time,” seemed promising, but led to nothing. As You Like It, with its “ churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,” brought me so near that I wonder I escaped it ; but something led me astray again, and I read through nearly the whole of Timon of Athens. Failing here, I again had recourse to the sonnets, this time with the thought that I had seen the phrase in the Golden Treasury, and that it therefore could not be among the plays. This clue, however, had more ends to it than it occurred to my density to follow out ; and I was finally indebted for the verification of the quotation to the accidental discovery made by one of the family, to whom I had submitted the problem. Then at last I understood the association of faithless friendship which all the time had hovered about the original phrase, leaving me, nevertheless, unable to determine whether it was implied in the forgotten benefits, or had been thought worthy of separate mention in the context. I read the song through carefully, and tried to fix the whole in my mind, but possibly only succeeded in attaching to the phrase one more train of associations, which, the next time I want to find the quotation, may lead me on a wild-goose chase to the “Frog who would a-Wooing go, Heigh-ho ! ” or on some other equally fruitless expedition. It is not unlikely, either, that a different train still may take me another time on a hunt through Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s ballads.

The same lucky young woman who found this quotation also read to me, one evening, part of a certain melancholy ode, some days after I had told her of a line running through my head about “ clouds that give their motion to the stars.” Led on by “ waters on a starry night,” I had hunted through Wordsworth, and under the influence of “ stooping through a fleecy cloud ”

I had read a good part of Milton, but naturally without the success I desired. And I was dependent on another young woman —who, as it chanced, had but the day before read the poem — for the source of a line which spoke of well-meant groping “among the heart-strings of a friend.” The line came into my mind one morning when I was thinking of the tragedy wrought in a life near me by a cruel silence, maintained from motives of pure kindness, and in the conviction of an apparently wise resolve. There was a suggestion of popularity about the line which sent me to Tennyson. I had looked through In Memoriam, because of some associations of idea or metre, and given up the search in Lockslcy Hall, when I came to the “ chord of self.”

Those readers of the Club whose memory is better than mine will recognize the quotation without any further suggestions from me ; and those who get the same satisfaction out of their imperfect memory which I have undertaken to describe may be interested enough to care to follow up the quotation according to their own lights.