Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.

Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.

Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.

As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.