Thirteen Worthies (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Thirteen Worthies

Page 7easily to our lips when we think of the worthies - eight or ten of them, at least - of whom Mr. Powys writes in these engaging essays. We need a word which, like a Chinese ideogram, conveys a complex mental picture and touches in a flash the springs of the five senses, a word that suggests, among other things, the ruddy skins, slightly shrivelled, the toughness and viscosity, the pungent flavour of rare country apples that have been laid away for the winter.

I am the freer to use this figure because Mr. Powys' worthies are all so redolent of the vegetable kingdom their veins seem to flow as much with the sap of trees as with the blood of animals and (on occasion) the ichor of angels. How firmly planted they appear to be in the fat soil of those old-world meadows and river bottoms of which their writings, so sweet and so bitter, might almost be taken for a direct expression. Vari ous as were the parts they played inlife and far as some of them wan dered in the world, their poetry and their wisdom, as Mr. Powys shows us, were fruits of the long infancy, the profound, productive inertia of that abundant rural life of old times.

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