When will you understand?A related post: Every Man's Anthology
Mark what I say:
Whatever you hold in your hand
Will be blown away.
Must you learn for yourself?
Listen, take warning:
Whatever you leave on the shelf
Will be gone by morning.
Soon you must play your part.
What are you learning?
Get it by heart! By heart!
I have seen books burning.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
16 October 2014
By Heart
Beatrice Warde, "By Heart," written during the London Blitz and quoted in Francis Meynell's My Lives (London: Bodley Head, 1971), p. 176: