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In this issue's Browser section:
Books: How Nations Prosper - Music: Make a Joyful Noise - Open Book - Off the Shelf - Chapter & Verse

A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words

Alden Manchester is looking for the source (possibly Mark Twain) of the statement "History does not repeat itself; it chimes."

Robert E. Simon Jr. seeks the full text of a poem that begins, "Thou with thy lookes, on whom I look full oft."

Dan Johnston would like to find the poem that includes the line "It's time to say goodbye."

M. B. Weissman asks which opponent of Galileo said, "There are seven windows in the head...so in the heavens there are two favorable stars, two unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury alone, undecided and indifferent. From which, and many other phenomena of nature...we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven....[N]ow if we increase the number of planets, this whole system falls to the ground."

John Shepardson needs help locating a quotation from Grimm's Fairy Tales that begins "'[?]' said the Dwarf, 'is more precious to me than [?].'" The substance of the remark is that a human relationship is more precious than gold.

Gordon Douglas hopes to learn the source of the following quotation, possibly a paraphrasing of lines from Paradise Lost: "There is nothing that man likes to do better than to create, unless it be to destroy."

David R. Jones requests an explanation of "Drumstick Lipstick," one of the encomiums appearing in "You're the Top," from Cole Porter's Anything Goes.

"O let not sleep" (May-June). John Gordon was first to identify this quotation, from John Dryden's translation of Virgil's Georgics (book iii, lines 663-666).


Send inquiries and answers to "Chapter and Verse" Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138. Readers seeking texts of poems or passages identified for others are asked to include a stamped, self-addressed, legal-sized envelope with their requests.

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