Commonplace Book

'"...Gratitude is a divine emotion: it fills the heart, but not to bursting: it warms it, but not to fever. I like to taste leisurely of bliss: devoured in haste, I do not know its flavour."'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Twenty-Eight)

Commonplace Book

'The hotel was, certainly, unlike other hotels; but it is useless to pretend that the eastern wave of luxury, which was now spending itself in London, had as yet broken over the interior of this, one of the first built hotels in England. Encaustic tiles make it echo, red flock papers make it dark. The rooms are too large, too well designed. With floating palm trees and ferns in them, they have, more than ever, the air of an empty aquarium waiting for new, half-human, half-marine specimens until even the round ottomans in the centre of the floor become so many closed-up red anemones on the tank bottom, the sofas and chairs loose rocks. Move these, and from under will crawl sideways some crustacean and armoured spinster, or a purple-faced monster of an old oceanic Colonel. When, however, the observer looks more closely, the greenery is too arid to justify such imagery; the leaves of palm and aspidistra are hard and withered, scratch the wall at any draught. Indeed the palm trees lumbering up in the corners of the rooms are so tall, their outspread fingers so bony, that they resemble rather the reconstructed extinct monsters at a Natural History Museum than anything in an aquarium.'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter VIII)

Commonplace Book

'...Once more he could hear the peculiar leafy rustle made by the silken flounces of the crinolines, as they rippled caressingly past, while patchouli floated to him over the shrill east wind, whose shrieking he could not hear, whose sting he could hardly feel. Once more in his empty conch sounded the langorous lilt, beating up into a furious storm, of the Hungarian band, in their slung jackets and gaudy frogged uniforms. Or, he was back in the fabulous spring days of his youth, when May burnt with a steady green flame now unknown, and, as though the honeyed west wind had lifted suddenly a curtain, every tree was revealed weighed down by blossom, from the formal, pointed flambeaux of the chestnuts to the gold-flecked white foam of the fruit trees, to the hedge of hawthorns that were, at these moments, avenues of white-winged ships in full sail across a green ocean...'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'...For from this novel, disturbing sensation was being born slowly, painfully, another emotion, jealousy: and Miss Bramley was frigid in manner to anyone who displayed a tendency to become intimate with the old lady. Even upon the casual acquaintance of a hotel - upon that pathetic over-dressed proportion of England's surplus middle-aged females, which in the short span between sunrise and sunset, birth and death, finds an assurance of eternity in the involute inanities of a conversation carried on among itself, and thus lives by taking in its own spiritual washing or, occasionally, washing its own dirty linen - Miss Bramley turned a severe and then a threatening eye...'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter IV)