Clay Court Season

Famous quotes containing the words clay, court and/or season:

    And here the precious dust is layd;
    Whose purely temper’d Clay was made
    So fine, that it the guest betray’d.

    Else the soule grew so fast within,
    It broke the outward shell of sinne,
    And so was hatch’d a Cherubin.
    Thomas Carew (1589–1639)

    Follow a shaddow, it still flies you;
    Seeme to flye it, it will pursue:
    So court a mistris, shee denyes you;
    Let her alone, shee will court you.
    Say, are not women truely, then,
    Stil’d but the shaddowes of us men?
    At morne, and even, shades are longest;
    At noone, they are or short, or none:
    So men at weakest, they are strongest,
    But grant us perfect, they’re not knowne.
    Say, are not women truely, then,
    Stil’d but the shaddowes of us men?
    Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

    The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.
    Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)