Chapter and Verse

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words

More queries from the archive: 

“The dawgondist skaw/that a man ever saw/I saw on Vesuvius side/as I wandered one day/in the middle of May.…” (From a poem, possibly by the American artist and writer Peter Newell, describing the 1872 eruption of Mount Vesuvius.)

“What was Karl Marx but Macaulay with his heels in the air?” 

“What the rugged soil denies/The harvest of the mind supplies.” (Attributed to “a sweet New England poet.”)

“Reflecting one night on the pains and toils…encountered by those in search of what this world calls Pleasure…I had resolved to quit my native land forever…and in some remote country…to establish a new character.” (A passage copied into a commonplace book kept by a merchant seaman from 1849 to 1852.)

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail to chapterandverse@harvardmag.com.

Click here for the May-June 2011 issue table of contents

You might also like

The Future of Tuberculosis

Five Questions with Carole Diane Mitnick

Harvard Augments Financial Aid—and Girds for Austerity

Dean Hopi Hoekstra details Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ priorities.

Harvard Responds to Protests

Smaller campus actions draw administrative and online responses.

Most popular

Making Schools Work

Tom Kane deploys data to help improve education.

Walter E. Fernald

From enlightened care for the intellectually disabled, to eugenics, and back

The New Old Boston Athenaeum

Find “the joy of discovery and power of this unique place.”

Explore More From Current Issue

Harvard's Tom Kane on Effective School Reforms

Tom Kane deploys data to help improve education.

Teen "Grind" Culture and Mental Health

Teens need better strategies to cope with lives lived partly online.

“AI Anxiety”

The Undergraduate on the uneasy collision of technology and writing