“O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.”
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Andrew Lang 10
Scots poet, novelist and literary critic 1844–1912Related quotes
Historia naturalis bulgarica 4: 10 - 15.

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

“O farmers, pray that your summers be wet and your winters clear.”
Umida<!--Humida?--> solstitia atque hiemes orate serenas,
agricolae.
Umida solstitia atque hiemes orate serenas,
agricolae.
Book I, lines 100–101
Georgics (29 BC)

(12th June 1824) Stanzas
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

“The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.”
Review of "The House Beautiful" by Channing Pollock, New Yorker (21 March 1931)