It's easier to quote poets than to read them.

0000000000 Allison Barrows

This morning I had one more quotation to check for my calendar — it was by Cowper and I was quite sure that it wasn't correct quoted. I thought it would take me at the most fifteen minutes. How wrong I was! I started with our own bookcases — I found that we have quite a few poems by Cowper, but not "The Winter Evening" which I was looking for. Next source to try was Internet — there are more links than anybody can read in a lifetime about William Cowper so it took a while before I found a site with his poems. Just click on the title and the poem pops up — all poems but the one I wanted. The site was faulty. Finally I found another link that took me to the poem. All those guys who wrote poetry in the mid and late sixteenth century seemed to have been extremely eloquent — I think the poem was ten pages long so it took some more time before I found what I was looking for.
As always when I look up things — whether on-line or in books — I get sidetracked. Today I found Arthur's Classic Novels, an excellent place to find e-books.

Then I had to find out who Beilby Porteus was. I found this quotation by him

One murder made a villain,
Millions, a hero.

and felt I wanted to know the man behind the words.

Just when I was about to finish my research I saw the name Isaac Bickerstaffe. Before yesterday it wouldn't had caught my interest — but I started to read Mary Ann Shaffer's "The Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" yesterday and had to find out more about him, or actually them.

The planned fifteen minutes research has taken most of the day. I still have some letters to write — one of them will take some time as I'm stuck in the middle of a sentence I need to translate — I simply can't make it into good English....