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A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words
Robert Russell seeks the source of the following quatrain, possibly by Virgil, "O! Let not sleep my closing eyes invade/In open plains or in the secret shade;/When he, renewed in all the speckled pride/Of pompous youth, has cast his sloth aside."
Eric Kocen is looking for the source of the quotation "Death delivered an undoomed Earl."
Sam Ortiz asks who made the statement "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." The sixteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations indicates that the historical attribution to Daniel Burnham is now in doubt.
William Knecht would like to know how Almono Loeto Young, first-born son of John Willard Young, and grandson of Brigham Young, got his name. He wonders whether it may have been inspired by a character in a nineteenth-century novel.
"Oh, God! That man should be a thing for mortal souls to sieve through" (March-April). John Gordon found this slightly misremembered quotation in chapter 35, "The Log and Line," of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
"Four ducks on a pond" (March-April). Georg Luck was first to identify the nineteenth-century Irish poet and editor William Allingham as the author of this work. Eleanor Wiles cited Poems by William Allingham (Macmillan, 1912) as a source for the complete text.