Good reader! if you e’er have seen,
When Phoebus hastens to his pillow,
The mermaids, with their tresses green,
Dancing upon the western billow;
If you have seen, at twilight dim,
When the long spirit’s vesper hymn
Floats wild along the western shore,
If you have seen, through mist of eve,
The fairy train their ringlets weave,
Glancing along the spangled green:—
If you have seen all this, and more,
God bless me, what a deal you’ve seen!
“My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the heads of fairy tales. In ‘Once upon a time’ an ‘O’ had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came, years later, for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times over, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the word’s beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.”
Eudora Welty | One Writer’s Beginnings