Stories Of The Sea by Diana Secker Tesdell

But Raggles would awake to a sense of shivering cold and a haunting impression of ideals lost in a depressing aura of potato salad and fish. Partington, plumes and patchouli, and to disturb his rest with a soaring and beautiful song of future promise. So they were to poet Raggles and his mind carried a concrete and clear conception of the figure that symbolized and typified each one that he had wooed.Ĭhicago seemed to swoop down upon him with a breezy suggestion of Mrs. Through the ancient poets we have learned that the cities are feminine. Fickle Raggles!-but perhaps he had not met the civic corporation that could engage and hold his fancy.

And when he had found the heart of a city and listened to its secret confession, he strayed on, restless, to another. He footed it on dusty roads, or sped magnificently in freight cars, counting time as of no account. Two thousand miles to the north, south, east and west, Raggles wandered in poetic fervor, taking the cities to his breast. A city to Raggles was not merely a pile of bricks and mortar, peopled by a certain number of inhabitants it was a thing with soul characteristic and distinct an individual conglomeration of life, with its own peculiar essence, flavor, and feeling. He studied cities as women study their reflections in mirrors as children study the glue and sawdust of a dislocated doll as the men who write about wild animals study cages in the zoo. Raggles's specialty, had he been driven to ink and paper, would have been sonnets to the cities. But, to linger with the primary proposition, Raggles was a poet. His Odyssey would have been a Limerick, had it been written. In all his life he never wrote a line of verse he lived his poetry. He was called a tramp but that was only an elliptical way of saying that he was a philosopher, an artist, a traveler, a naturalist, and a discoverer.

Stories Of The Sea by Diana Secker Tesdell