The Bibliophilist Once Again

February 12, Saturday, at Black Bond Books at Guildford Town Centre once again, I stumbled upon these gems on SALE: Alan Alexander Milne's The House at Pooh Corner and Now We Are Six; unfortunately, the two remaining books of the classic tetralogy, Winnie the Pooh and When We Were Very Young, were unavailable. I bought also four books from the Dover Thrift Editions: Love: A Book of Quotations, Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven and Other Favorite Poems, English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology, and Poems of Faith.

Then, on February 18, while we were buying groceries at Save-on-Foods, I saw for the second time a discounted copy of the fifteenth-anniversary edition of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum, so I didn't waste any more time; I bought a copy at once.

1. The House at Pooh Corner by Alan Alexander Milne (1992, Puffin Books) – The second book in the popular tetralogy that brought us Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga and Roo, and of course Christopher Robin.

"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever.
Not even when I'm a hundred."

Pooh thought for a little. "How old shall I be then?"

"Ninety-nine."

Pooh nodded. "I promise," he said.

2. Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne (1992, Puffin Books) – The final book in the Pooh tetralogy, this features the adventures and childhood memories of the characters in verse.

"There was once an old sailor my grandfather knew
Who had so many things which he wanted to do
That, whenever he thought it was time to begin,
He couldn't because of the state he was in.

3. Love: A Book of Quotations, edited by Herb Galewitz, (1998, Dover Publications) – "Everyone has something to say about love, but very little of it is memorable. This book presents a little of what has been said, but all of it worth remembering."

"Love is not blind; it is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard."—James Matthew Barrie

"Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering.
The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable."—Henry Ward Beecher

"Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart know no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances."—Christian Nestell Bovee

"Love is a true renewer."—Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

"There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings."—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Mutual love, the crown of all bliss."—John Milton

"Love has no age, as it is always renewing."—Blaise Pascal

"To write a good loveletter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say,
and to finish without knowing what you have written."—Jean Jacques Rousseau

"Love-verses, writ without any real passion, are the most nauseous of all conceits."—William Shenstone

"Lord, I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing."—Jonathan Swift

"Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."—Alfred Lord Tennyson

"Platonic love is love from the neck up."—Thyra Samter Winslow

"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

4. The Raven and Other Favorite Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (1991, Dover Publications) – "The Raven" is regarded as one of the most popular poems in the English Language; this edition includes 40 more of Edgar Allan Poe's most memorable poems.

from "Dreams":

Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!
My spirit not awakening, till the beam
Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.
———
But should it be—that dream eternally
Continuing—as dreams have been to me
In my young boyhood—should it thus be given,
'T were folly still to hope for higher Heaven.

5. English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Stanley Appelbaum, (1996, Dover Publications) – This collection features selected poems by England's six greatest pioneers of Romantic Poetry: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.

from "Song" by William Blake:

How sweet I roam'd from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride,
'Till I the prince of love beheld,
Who in the sunny beams did glide!

from "I wandered lonely as a cloud" by William Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

from "Dejection: An Ode" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

A grief without pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear——

from "When we two parted" by Lord Byron:

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

from "To a Skylark" by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

from "Ode on Melancholy" by John Keats:

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose——

6. Poems of Faith, edited by Bob Blaisdell, (2002, Dover Publications) – This anthology features works by more than 60 British and American poets—all of which delve on faith, or the secure belief in a Supreme Being.

from "I never saw a moor" by Emily Dickinson:

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

7. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum (2004, The Random House Publishing Group) – I first discovered this book in College through a classmate who lent me her copy of it. I am yet to reread this reconsidered, revised, and expanded edition; but here I am already sharing something from it worth remembering.

"The older I get the more I realize how much I think is a composite of the goods selected from the supermarket shelves of the world of thought."