1.       It is a fact that not once in my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter. Even while I trotted prattling by my nurse’s side I regretted the good old days when I had, and wasn’t, a perambulator. When I grew up it seemed to me that the one advantage of living in London was that nobody ever wanted me to come out for a walk. London’s very drawbacks – its endless noise and bustle, its smoky air, the squalor ambushed everywhere in it – assured this one immunity.

          Whenever I was with friends in the country, I knew that at any moment, unless rain were actually falling, some man might suddenly say “Come out for a walk!” in that sharp imperative tone which he would not dream of using in any other connexion. People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk. Any one thus desirous feels that he has a right to impose his will on whomever he sees comfortably settled in an arm-chair, reading. It is easy to say simply “No” to an old friend. In the case of a mere acquaintance one wants some excuse. “I wish I could, but” – nothing ever occurs to me except “I have some letters to write.” This formula is unsatisfactory in three ways. (1) It isn’t believed. (2) It compels you to rise from your chair, go to the writing-table, and sit improvising a letter to somebody until the walkmonger (just not daring to call you liar and hypocrite) shall have lumbered out of the room. (3) It won’t operate on Sunday mornings. “There’s no post out till this evening” clinches the matter; and you may as well go quietly.

----from Max Beerbohm: Going Out For A Walk

2.        The most complex lesson the literary point of view teaches – and it is not, to be sure, a lesson available to all, and is even difficult to keep in mind once acquired – is to allow the intellect to become subservient to the heart. What wide reading teaches is the richness, the complexity, the mystery of life. In the wider and longer view, I have come to believe, there is something deeply apolitical – something above politics – in literature, despite what feminist, Marxist, and other politicized literary critics may think. If at the end of a long life of reading the chief message you bring away is that women have had it lousy, or that capitalism stinks, or that attention must above all be paid to victims, then I’d say you just might have missed something crucial. Too bad, for there probably isn’t time to go back to re-read your lifetime’s allotment of five thousand or so books.

          People who have read with love and respect understand that the larger message behind all books, great and good and even some not so good as they might be, is, finally, cultivate your sensibility so that you may trust your heart. The charmingly ironic point of vast reading, at least as I have come to understand it, is to distrust much of one’s education. Unfortunately, the only way to know this is first to become educated, just as the only way properly to despise success is first to achieve it.

----from Joseph Epstein: Narcissus Leaves the Pool

3.        The style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and uniform; Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind, Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden’s page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope’s is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled by the roller.

          Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates; the superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden. It is not to be inferred, that of this poetical vigor Pope had only a little, because Dryden had more; for every other writer since Milton must give place to Pope; and even of Dryden it must be said, that, if he has brighter paragraphs, he has not better poems. Dryden’s performances were always hasty, either excited by some external occasion, or extorted by domestic necessity; he composed without consideration, and published without correction. What his mind could supply at call, or gather in one excursion, was all that he sought, and all that he gave. The dilatory caution of Pope enabled him to condense his sentiments, to multiply his images, and to accumulate all that study might produce, or chance might supply. If the flights of Dryden therefore are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden’s fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope’s the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expectation, and Pope never falls below it.

----from Samuel Johnson: Pope

4.       It was the first rose of the year, big, red and heavy-scented. I had watched it grow from a bud, but somehow I had missed the final stage of the metamorphosis, so that it seemed to have changed from a bud to a full-blown rose overnight.

          I had been waiting impatiently for this ultimate apparition of fully developed beauty, but now that it was actually here I was at a loss how to deal with it, overwhelmed by such perfection. I looked at the rose through the window, but I hesitated to go out into the garden and address it directly, although it was waiting there in evident expectation of a first act of homage.

          When I finally plucked up the courage to go to it, I buried my face in its petals and inhaled its fragrance but could think of nothing to say beyond the trite words, “beautiful, beautiful.” The rose seemed satisfied, however, and smiled at me warmly. A bee emerged from the heart of the rose, circled my head twice and flew off across the garden.

          I felt that summer had begun.

----from Michael Bullock: The First Rose of the Summer