Pebbles

Our discussion of Jeanette's brown pebble has sent me off searching for more. I'm starting a collection. One that comes quickly to mind, belongs to a poet Jeanette's mother might have known, at least in his hymns. This, for instance, sounds very much like Mum's cup of blood, no?

"There is a fountain fill'd with blood
Drawn from EMMANUEL's veins;
And sinners, plung'd beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains."
Olney Hymns (1779)--'Praise for the Fountain Opened'

William Cowper (26 November 1731 – 25 April 1800) was an unhappy man who turned to evangelical Christianity, poetry and the company of good women to save himself from suicide. But don't be put off. Cowper also reinvented English poetry by writing of daily experience, celebrating the glory of God's creation, by writing beautifully about his own patch of nature, even writing perhaps the sweetest poem ever in memory of a favorite bunny, "epitaph on a hare."

Cowper's pebble is found in the following line, which might have been written about Jeanette in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. See if you don't see much of the girl evangelist's struggle summed up in these two lines:

“Nor sword nor spear the stripling took,
But chose a pebble from the brook.”

This from Cowper's poem: Jehovah-Nissi. The Lord My Banner, which is based on Exodus, xvii.15. Here's the whole first stanza:

"By whom was David taught
To aim the deadly blow,
When he Goliath fought,
And laid the Gittite low?
Nor sword nor spear the stripling took,
But chose a pebble from the brook."

(So, British slang fans, might not the Gittite be a possible origin for the put-down "git?")

Any other pebbles from literature to match the one Jeanette keeps in his pocket? Stay tuned.