“O, heavens! is’t possible, a young maid’s wits
Should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”
#hamlet_2026

Charlotte Brontë - BOTD

#Hamlet_2026

Benjamin West
Ophelia and Laertes
Cincinnati Art Museum

OPHELIA

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.

#Hamlet_2026
Act IV s5 (171-172)

[Enter Ophelia]

LAERTES.
Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.

Act IV s5 #Hamlet_2026 #Love #Nature

(2/2)

Blackstone Library, Connecticut. FIRST FLOOR Mezzanine & Study Carrels BIOGRAPHY & NONFICTION Cosgrove Terrace Lucy T. Hammer Conference ~ Room Reference & Information Desk Front Entrance Auditorium Newspapers & Magazines Reading Room BLACKSTONE LIBRARY SECOND FLOOR Computer Lab Conference Room Rotunda Gallery Staff Offices FIRST FLOOR Auditorium Café Lucy T. Hammer Conference Room Mezzanine & Study Carrels Newspapers & Magazines Reading Room Reference & Information Desk Access to Exterior Terrace BIOGRAPHY NONFICTION GROUND FLOOR Children's & Teen Desk Craft & Activity Room Circulation & Information Desk Family Restroom Restrooms AUDIOBOOKS CHILDREN'S BOOKS & DVDS DVDS FICTION GRAPHIC NOVELS LARGE PRINT NEW BOOKS TEEN BOOKS & DVDS

Melville shelf, Wallingford, CT.

Looking in, library we stopped at on a Sunday wandering CT.

#NationalLibraryWeek

A house up the road, mid-April. #catkins

The mountains are calling & I must go.
Sierraclub founder John Muir was born today in 1838.

Poem: Horizon at Sea. Eunice Tietjens. 1940. Painting: Breaking Storm, Coast of Maine, 1894, by Winslow Homer.

#MelvilleMonday

✍️E. Tietjens, Horizon at Sea

Hard and blue hangs the horizon
In its perfect circle curled,
While we teeter, swing and stagger,
Shifting in a shifting world.

One would think it had existence,
This horizon firm and stable,
Lying like the sharp-cut edges
Of a blue and cosmic table.

Ruhe

Eyvind Earle, California Coast (1975)

“Consider; for a smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities, Pierre.”

— Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

Happy #MelvilleMonday🐳

Source: HERMAN MELVILLE: PIERRE, ISRAEL POTTER, THE PIAZZA TALES, THE CONFIDENCE-MAN, BILLY BUDD, UNCOLLECTED PROSE Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984, New York, N.Y. Tenth Printing, The Library of America.

Artwork by Francis Day. Photograph from The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty. From the article HERMAN MELVILLE'S SOFT WITHDRAWAL by John Updike, May 2, 1982, The New Yorker.

#MelvilleMonday

Give ear, now, all ye shore-disdaining, ocean-enamored youths, who labor under the lamentable delusion, that the sea—the "glorious sea" is always and in reality "the blue, the fresh, the ever free!"

- Herman Melville

Large textile panel with from top to bottom, an 1820 admiralty map of the North Atlantic and Arctic, a scene of Arctic whaling and a whale in shades of blue.

Feeling good this morning because over the weekend I came up with a way forward for editing my (creative?) non fiction manuscript on the History of British Arctic Whaling. I’ve been at a loss for months and this is such a relief.

At times, I mounted aloft, and lounging in the slings of the topsail yard . . . I gazed broad off upon the blue boundless sea, and wondered what they were doing in that unknown land, toward which we were fated to be borne.

~ Mardi, C31
#MelvilleMonday

#MelvilleMonday

Matrosen im Ausguck

At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and Germans are now among the least.

Moby Dick. LXXXI.

Happy #MelvilleMonday, dear friends!

#MelvilleMonday

„But the more his thoughtful river ran, the more mysteriousness it floated to him; and yet the more certainty that the mysteriousness was unchangeble“

Happy #MelvilleMonday 🐳!

Herman Melville
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities.
VIII

#MelvilleMonday

Ahoy, Shipmates & Friends!

Happy #MelvilleMonday ! 🐳

“. . . as we mortals ourselves spring all naked and scabbardless into the world. Yet, rather, are we scabbards to our souls. And the drawn soul of genius is more glittering than the drawn cimeter of Saladin.”

~Mardi C32

OPHELIA

Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

#Hamlet_2026
Act IV s5 (41-42)

KING.
Follow her close, give her good watch, I pray you.
O, this is the poison of deep grief; it springs all
From her father's death. O Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions!

(2/2) In memory of a childhood friend's father who was 92. 🕊️

"if i must fade
let it be like stars
dimming
for the sake
of morning" - Francesco Mastrangelo

#sundaysentence

Along the way

Medieval manuscript image of two fish swimming in waves of water.

wæter-stefn, f.n: the voice or sound of water. (WAT-er-STEH-vun / ˈwæ-tɛr-ˌstɛ-vən)
Image: Bestiary; Iran (Maragheh), c. 1297-1300; Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.500, f. 78v.
#OldEnglish #WOTD

HAMLET

How all occasions do inform against me,
and spur my dull revenge.

#Hamlet_2026
IV,4,32-33
William Shakespeare
Arden London/ New York 1982

Beach Hotel.

HAMLET

Sure, He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.

#Hamlet_2026
Act IV s4 (36-39)

Latest read (audio), Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton; a doomed love triangle set in snowy New England, as Ethan Frome falls in love with a relation of his joyless wife.
I love this more now than decades ago. A tonic to read a woman writer sympathizing with her male character.
#BookSky