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A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words
Bob Reitherman hopes to find the source of the line "A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury."
Olga Murray would like to know the origin of the saying "Out of the mud grows the lotus."
"more than we dared dream" (May-June). Peter Kane Dufault identified his own words from "Evensong," a poem published in his collection New Things Come into the World.
A dog's nose (May-June). J.W. McPherson was the first to cite John Updike's short story "Pigeon Feathers" as the source of this description. Updike himself noted that the original query conflated two instances in the story: "the ending, wherein the young hero sees in the intricacy of dead pigeons' feathers reassurance of God's existence, and an earlier passage, where he observes of his pet dog that 'in his agitation Copper panted through nostrils that were elegant slits, like two healed cuts, or like the keyholes of a dainty lock of black, grained wood. His whole whorling, knotted, jointed body was a wealth of such embellishments.' "
"Dream dreams, and write them" (May-June). Ray Carney pointed out that these lines are carved into the base of a statue of Samuel Eliot Morison installed on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Emily Morison Beck, the historian's daughter (and former editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations), explained that no specific citation has surfaced for the quotation, but it was strongly associated with Morison, serving as a motto for him during his lifetime.