Dreamthorp

I have long been a fan of the song "I could be with anyone" by Kevin Devine.

Kev Dev is a tremendous lyricist who is excellent at capturing the essence of what it is to grow up in the alternative culture these days, and indeed more general terms. "I could be with anyone" is a very good example of this.
The clue is in the title, and this song is primarily about the idea of how we form relationships and the part that luck and circumstance play in those who we come to love.

I use this introduction as a framing device to a quote that I'd like to show you from an obscure essay by the Scottish poet Alexander Smith from his book of essays Dreamthorp, originally published in 1864. Through my job, in which I have to value some strange old books, some very interesting, some otherwise, I often find myself reading things that I otherwise would never think of doing so. Alexander Smith is a good example of this.

I began reading his essay "On Vagabonds", the final essay of the book, and was impressed by how relevant and interesting the points he makes are.

Permit me to show you two quotes. They are constructed in that beautiful old style of writing that is so much more intrinsically appealing that the stuff you get today.

The first is on the same point that Kevin Devine is making. Obviously Alexander Smith's ideas come across in a fairly dated fashion, but I think that the point underneath is still completely valid.

"Our young men are terribly alike. For these many years back the young gentlemen I have had the fortune to encounter are clever, knowing, selfish, disagreeable; the young ladies are of one pattern like minted sovereigns of the same reign - excellent gold, I have no doubt, but each bearing the same awfully proper image and superscription... Courtship is an absurdity, and a sheer waste of time. If a man could but close his eyes in a ball-room, dash into a bevy of muslin beauties, carry off the fair one that accident gives to his arms, his raid would be as reasonable and as likely to produce happiness as the more ordinary methods of procuring a spouse"

The second quote is a little more vague, and I just think it makes a wonderful point that feels truer today.

 "Ah me! what a world this was to live in two or centuries ago when it was getting itself discovered - when the sunset gave up America, when a steel hand had the spoiling of Mexico and Peru! Then were the "Arabian Nights" common place enchantments a matter of course and romance the most ordinary thing in the world. Then man was courting nature, now he has married her. Every mystery is dissapated."