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On writing well.
There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful; but two afford me particularly intense pleasure. One is the opening paragraph from his essay “On Dreams”:
Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives. A good part of our sleepes is peeced out with visions, and phantasticall objects wherin wee are confessedly deceaved. The day supplyeth us with truths, the night with fictions and falsehoods, which uncomfortably divide the natural account of our beings. And therefore having passed the day in sober labours and rationall enquiries of truth, wee are fayne to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherin the soberest heads have acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no better then folly and madnesse.
And the other is the final paragraph from the second chapter of the fifth book of the immense, glorious, and shamefully neglected miscellany Pseudodoxia Epidemica, entitled “Of the Picture of Dolphins”:
Continued below.
thelampmagazine.com
There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful; but two afford me particularly intense pleasure. One is the opening paragraph from his essay “On Dreams”:
Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives. A good part of our sleepes is peeced out with visions, and phantasticall objects wherin wee are confessedly deceaved. The day supplyeth us with truths, the night with fictions and falsehoods, which uncomfortably divide the natural account of our beings. And therefore having passed the day in sober labours and rationall enquiries of truth, wee are fayne to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherin the soberest heads have acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no better then folly and madnesse.
And the other is the final paragraph from the second chapter of the fifth book of the immense, glorious, and shamefully neglected miscellany Pseudodoxia Epidemica, entitled “Of the Picture of Dolphins”:
Continued below.
How to Write English Prose
To my mind, each is in its own way a perfect, exquisitely faceted gem of English prose from an especially glorious literary epoch. Browne’s prose is a magnificent Baroque palace, by dizzying turns grandiose or lyrical, opulent or elegant, monstrous or precious, inordinate or harmonious, carelessly…
thelampmagazine.com
