DR INGE AND HOLIDAY READING

Evening Star, Issue 23379, 23 September 1939, Page 17

DR INGE AND HOLIDAY READING

— j “ It is an interesting question whether, when we take a holiday in some famous beauty spot, as some of us will soon bo doing,, wo want to take with us any of the great poets of nature, such as Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. 1 often -pack up my Wordsworth for these holidays, but I must confess that I very seldom read him.” writes Dr Inge, ex r Dean.of St, Paul’s, in the ‘Evening Standard.’ “ When 1 am by the sea, which, as Euripides says, ‘ Washes away all human ills,’ or, better still, watch the waves from the deck of a ship; when 1 stand before a mountain or a waterfall, 1 do not want to be invited to think of life and death and human folly ; I prefer to let Nature speak to .me in her own language, which is soothing without being at all explicit. “ Dr Johnson, dragged half against his will to the Highlands, thought it was easier ‘to sit at home and conceive rocks, heaths, and waterfalls.' it is, I think, when we recall these scenes in imagination by our firesides that we are most inclined to enjoy the nature poets. I dare say 1 am quite wrong, but such is ray own feeling. I read a great deal on a Mediterranean cruise, but not poetry about the sea and the mountains. “ We are made very differently, and 1 pity those who .cannot enjoy books. But it is those who enjoy them most who have to beware of intellectual dram-drinking. When we have taken in all that we can digest it is worse than useless to stuff our minds with good things which we cannot assimilate.”