Galsworthy, John, Sir

Fraternity Galsworthy, John, Sir

Publisher Marketing: In the afternoon of the last day of April, 190-, a billowy sea of little broken clouds crowned the thin air above High Street, Kensington. This soft tumult of vapours, covering nearly all the firmament, was in onslaught round a patch of blue sky, shaped somewhat like a star, which still gleamed-a single gentian flower amongst innumerable grass. Each of these small clouds seemed fitted with a pair of unseen wings, and, as insects flight on their too constant journeys, they were setting forth all ways round this starry blossom which burned so clear with the colour of its far fixity. On one side they were massed in fleecy congeries, so crowding each other that no edge or outline was preserved; on the other, higher, stronger, emergent from their fellow-clouds, they seemed leading the attack on that surviving gleam of the ineffable. Infinite was the variety of those million separate vapours, infinite the unchanging unity of that fixed blue star. Down in the street beneath this eternal warring of the various soft-winged clouds on the unmisted ether, men, women, children, and their familiars-horses, dogs, and cats-were pursuing their occupations with the sweet zest of the Spring. They streamed along, and the noise of their frequenting rose in an unbroken roar: "I, I-I, I!" Contributor Bio:  Galsworthy, John, Sir John Galsworthy was a Nobel-Prize (1932) winning English dramatist, novelist, and poet born to an upper-middle class family in Surrey, England. He attended Harrow and trained as a barrister at New College, Oxford. Although called to the bar in 1890, rather than practise law, Galsworthy travelled extensively and began to write. It was as a playwright Galsworthy had his first success. His plays--like his most famous work, the series of novels comprising The Forsyte Saga--dealt primarily with class and the social issues of the day, and he was especially harsh on the class from which he himself came.