September shelter

"I sit with all the windows and the door [of the greenhouse] wide open, and am regaled with the scent of every flower in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it.  We keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive I should hardly hear more of their music.  All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite to the window; and pay me for the honey they get out of it by a hum, which though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling of my linnets."
September 18, 1784,  Buckinghamshire

Correspondence  William Cowper (quoted Geoffrey Grigson, as before)

The music of architecture

"For architecture can console, and inspire, as can no other art but music.  Under that stimulus, whether it soothes or fires, we see what the man-made world has been, and what it still could be."

British Architects and Craftsmen  Sacheverell Sitwell

The power of Orpheus

"Such Heavenly power in musick rests
It calmes and tames the savage beasts;
While Orpheus playes
Each beast obeyes."

from frontispiece to  A Book of Beasts,  Thomas Johnson,  published anonymously 1630 

The Senses of Loss

"It is said the musical sands will give out a sound even in a laboratory far from their native dunes.  It may be, yet sometimes in my London home  I take up a handful of  Crescent Lake sand and try to make it sing, but I listen in vain for the thunder-roll of its voice.  Between the leaves of a book I have pressed a small branch of sand-jujube* flowers, and whenever I catch its subtle but fading fragrance, I, like the Kashgarian exile, long for a place that seems so near and is yet so far away.  Sick with longing I walk among the crowds while my spirit flees to the quiet which is found by the hidden lake among the dunes."
[* eloeagnus latifolia]

The Gobi Desert  Mildred Cable with Francesca French