Henry Ryecroft’s Place of Longing

15 Apr

The Private Papers of Henry RyecroftI have been spending a week in Somerset. The right June weather put me in the mind for rambling, and my thoughts turned to the Severn Sea. I went to Glastonbury and Wells, and on to Cheddar, and so to the shore of the Channel at Clevedon, remembering my holiday of fifteen years ago, and too often losing myself in a contrast of the man I was then and what I am now. Beautiful beyond all words of description that nook of oldest England; but that I feared the moist and misty winter climate, I should have chosen some spot below the Mendips for my home and resting-place. Unspeakable the charm to my ear of those old names; exquisite the quiet of those little towns, lost amid tilth and pasture, untouched as yet by the fury of modern life, their ancient sanctuaries guarded, as it were, by noble trees and hedges overrun with flowers. In all England there is no sweeter and more varied prospect than that from the hill of the Holy Thorn at Glastonbury; in all England there is no lovelier musing place than the leafy walk beside the Palace Moat at Wells. As I think of the golden hours I spent there, a passion to which I can give no name takes hold upon me; my heart trembles with an indefinable ecstasy.

(George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1904), pp. 81-2.)

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One Response to “Henry Ryecroft’s Place of Longing”

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  1. Saudade « The Place of Longing - April 15, 2010

    […] Aubrey Bell, writing some twenty years later, states that ‘the word cannot be translated exactly, but corresponds to the Greek πόθος, Latin desiderium, Catalan anyoranza, Galician morriña, German Sehnsucht, Russian тоска (pron. taská). It is the “passion for which I can find no name”’. (Aubrey F.G. Bell, Portuguese Literature (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 135, fn. 1.) Interestingly, Bell, like Viana before him, does not attempt a single English term for saudade, relying on a list of words in other languages and a quotation from George Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. Actually, this is a misquotation; the original reads ‘a passion to which I can give no name’. The difference is immaterial yet it is worth remembering the original phrase within its context as it is most appropriate for a consideration of the relationship between loss and desire that saudade is supposed to evoke. Ryecroft’s place of longing has therefore been given its own entry. […]

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