March-April 2004 > The Browser

Chapter and Verse

Chapter & Verse

Frederick Wegener hopes someone can supply an earlier source for the remark "[I]t is often the higher nature that yields, because it is the most generous," which appears in Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1884 novel A Country Doctor.

 

Janice Weiss would like the source of the line, "Why do we feel so little at home in the world, which is the only home we’ve ever known?"

 

Jill Tallmer is trying to track down a statement, possibly by James Thurber, "that dogs naturally came to love humans because the human hand is ideally designed for petting dogs."

 

Robert Nicholson requests a precise citation from Saint Augustine for "Love calls us to the things of this world," credited to the saint by Richard Wilbur, who used it as the title of a poem.

 

C.A. Kolbe seeks a poem by Randall Jarrell, possibly titled "Poem for Daughters" and published in the Atlantic Monthly in the late ’50s or early ’60s. It contains the line, "When the camp says ‘dig graves now,’ I’ll know, and be with you."

 

"confused on a much higher plane" (March-April 2003). Christopher Henrich has forwarded two more variants. An epigraph ("Posted outside the mathematics reading room, Troms* University") from Bernt *ksendal’s Stochastic Differential Equations: An Introduction with Applications, runs: "We have not succeeded in answering all our problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things." In Terry Pratchett’s novel Equal Rites, the character Cutangle says, "While I’m still confused and uncertain, it’s on a much higher plane, d’you see, and at least I know I’m bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe."

 

Send inquiries and answers to "Chapter and Verse," Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138.