In a message dated 7/26/12 6:32:57 PM, [email protected] writes:
I can claim Henry Adams as a cousin since we share 2 distant ancestors (John Alden, Priscilla Mullins). Then you can also claim as cousins more illustrious Adamses than Henry: "He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Charles Francis Adams Sr. (1807-1886) and Abigail Brooks (1808-1889) into one of the country's most prominent families. Both his paternal grandfather, John Quincy Adams, and great grandfather, John Adams, one of the most prominent among the Founding Fathers, had been U.S. Presidents, his maternal grandfather was a millionaire, and another great grandfather, Nathaniel Gorham, signed the Constitution." William is right: An appetite for a well-formed ringing phrase was rampant in the nineteenth century, and it led more than Henry into foolish orotundity. Wilde coined some marvelous lines; some of them were mutually contradictory, but that did not deter Oscar. I remember reading some modern critic who was angrily disgusted by the vastly popular, alliterative and vacuous Algernon Swinburne: "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.b I think the critic dwelt for a paragraph on the fatuous hollowness of that phrase "the season of snows and sins" -- but Algie just couldn't resist the s's. More on how words use the user in my next.
