I can has books

[tree_and_leaf]

A trip to the Oxfam bookshop resulted in money being spent, most notably on a modernish reprint of Evelyn Underhill's history of mysticism, Mysticism, which I have wanted to read for ages, Mrs Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate (a narrative of the woes of a Tractarian priest, caught between a rector who thinks he is a dangerous radical, a faction of local opinion who thinks he's only interested in tat, another faction which is suspicious of his work among the working classes, and who has a love interest he can't afford to marry, and a problem with persistent and untrue rumours that he's having an affair with a shop-girl...), and HV Morton's Atlantic Meeting, an eye-witness account of Churchill and Roosevelt's meeting in 1941 off the coast of Newfoundland.

The latter provided an interesting photograph of a card given by Roosevelt to Churchill, which quoted a verse from Longfellow:

"Sail on, o ship of state!
Sail on, o Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all it's fears,
With all its hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!"

Which stuck me as familiar - because Leonard Cohen refers to it in "Democracy":

"Sail on, sail on, o mighty ship of state
To the Shores of Need Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst."

Clever man, Mr Cohen.