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A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words
In the September-October 1979 edition of this column, a reader sought the correct source for the following lines, which the Congressional Record had attributed to Hamlet: "So I am glad, not that my friend has gone,/But that the earth he laughed and lived upon was my earth too./That I had closely known and loved him/And that my love I'd shown./Tears over his departure?/Nay, a smile/That I had walked with him a little while." In 1986, Anthony Shipps found the poem printed in the October 7, 1928, issue of the New York Times Book Review, without a source, attributed to an author referred to only as "Innes." Now another person has sent in the same poem, seeking an attribution. Can any reader shed further light on this matter?
A.M. Richards hopes that someone can provide a source, possibly Herman Melville's Moby Dick, for the line "Ah, Man! What a poor sieve to strain souls through!"
Lionel Kay asks whether any reader knows of a source for the judgment "People are no damn good" prior to its publication as the caption for a cartoon by William Steig in the New Yorker.
David Lunden would like the full text, and name of the author, of a poem that begins "Three ducks on a pond,/Blue sky beyond...."
"Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!" (January-February). B.R. Peskin was first to identify this comment as the closing words of chapter 32, "Cetology," in Herman Melville's Moby Dick.