"If you want a red rose," said the Tree, "you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your own heart's-blood. You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn. All night long you must sing to me, and the thorn must pierce your heart, and your life-blood must flow into my veins, and become mine."

"Death is a great price to pay for a red rose," cried the Nightingale, "and Life is very dear to all. It is pleasant to sit in the green wood, and to watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent of the hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?"
—from "The Nightingale and the Rose," by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)


Oscar Wilde

   We have a longtime subscriber in Gumm Crick, a Mrs. Nicolete Kenny, who will come upon the odd phrase in a magazine, a peculiar collection of words, a sentiment expressed perhaps in a way that strikes her as different and true, and she will take her scissors and cut out the passage, wrap it in tissue, put it in an envelope, and send it by the next post to The Goombah. And we always read what she has sent and then usually put it in a carved wooden box with a tin
impression of an old peasant playing a balalaika applied with short brass nails to the lid. It is a box that somehow came to Hokumburg from Russia before the Revolution. It is too small to be useful and too old and lovely to be got rid of, so we keep odd scraps that catch our fancy in it. Things we believe at the time that we may want to return to later. But we seldom do. Who has the time?

This morning we stumbled upon an hour we had somehow misplaced this past spring.