On my breakfast table there is a pot of honey. Not the manufactured
stuff sold under that name in shops, but honey of the hive, brought to me
by a neighbouring cottager whose bees often hum in my garden. It gives,
I confess, more pleasure to my eye than to my palate; but I like to taste
of it, because it is honey.
There is as much difference, said Johnson, between a lettered and an
unlettered man as between the living and the dead; and, in a way, it was
no extravagance. Think merely how one's view of common things is
affected by literary association. What were honey to me if I knew
nothing of Hymettus and Hybla?--if my mind had no stores of poetry, no
memories of romance? Suppose me town-pent, the name might bring with it
some pleasantness of rustic odour; but of what poor significance even
that, if the country were to me mere grass and corn and vegetables, as to
the man who has never read nor wished to read. For the Poet is indeed a
Maker: above the world of sense, trodden by hidebound humanity, he builds
that world of his own whereto is summoned the unfettered spirit. Why
does it delight me to see the bat flitting at dusk before my window, or
to hear the hoot of the owl when all the ways are dark? I might regard
the bat with disgust, and the owl either with vague superstition or not
heed it at all. But these have their place in the poet's world, and
carry me above this idle present.
I once passed a night in a little market-town where I had arrived tired
and went to bed early. I slept forthwith, but was presently awakened by
I knew not what; in the darkness there sounded a sort of music, and, as
my brain cleared, I was aware of the soft chiming of church bells. Why,
what hour could it be? I struck a light and looked at my watch.
Midnight. Then a glow came over me. "We have heard the chimes at
midnight, Master Shallow!" Never till then had _I_ heard them. And the
town in which I slept was Evesham, but a few miles from
Stratford-on-Avon. What if those midnight bells had been to me but as
any other, and I had reviled them for breaking my sleep?--Johnson did not
much exaggerate.