[a bit of] Childe Harold by Byron

I thought I'd take a post to explain where my journal title comes from.

'A narcolepsy of a fond despair' is a play on this quote of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ is marriageableness. All that interests in any character introduced is still this one, Has he or she the money to marry with, and conditions conforming? ‘Tis ‘the nympholepsy of a fond despair,’ say, rather, of an English boarding house. Suicide is more respectable.”

Emerson is a douche, but with that phrase he himself is quoting Lord Byron and here is the section of the lengthy Childe Harold from whence it comes.

II. Descriptive and Narrative
Grotto of Egeria

(Childe Harold, Canto iv. Stanza 115)

EGERIA! sweet creation of some heart
Which found no mortal resting-place so fair
As thine ideal breast; whate’er thou art
Or wert,—a young Aurora of the air,
The nympholepsy of some fond despair;
Or, it might be, a beauty of the earth,
Who found a more than common votary there
Too much adoring; whatsoe’er thy birth,
Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.