Blossom By Blossom

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

    And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

    The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remember'd is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

    Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

                 --A.G. Swinburne, Chorus from Atalanta in Calydon, 1865

A New Natural History

The Huff (left) and a Gloat near a patch of I-Told-You-So. 

The Hoodwink on a spray of Ragamuffin. 

Left to right: the Thesaurus, the Stereopticon, and
the Hexameter. The tree is a Sacroiliac.

Thurber, of course. These are from his A New Natural History, which, along with a whole lot of other good stuff . . .

. . .can be found in Alarms and Diversions, one of his best collections. You can download it for free, in PDF, EPub, HTML and a bunch of other formats, here.

Henri Le Sidaner

Maison Blanche, Gerberoy

I had never even heard of Henri Le Sidaner until a couple of days ago, when I peeked in at Andrew Rickard's Charon's Barque and saw some pictures from a book his Obolus Press had just published -- a translation of Le Sidaner's biography, with illustrations. I checked around elsewhere and found I really like his work.

Le Sidaner's dates are 1862-1939. He called himself an "Intimist." His paintings look pretty Impressionist-y to me, with maybe a dash of Pointillism. Well, as the saying goes, I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. Unlike the guy in the Thurber cartoon:

Le Sidaner must have done pretty well for himself -- he had some really nice gardens. They're still maintained and open to the public.