Caroline

“For that poem, though in certain ‘strange and high’ qualities it is the inferior of the best jets of the Caroline genius, is one of the most faultless and perfect things in this or indeed in any period of English poetry, and may be said to impart the Caroline essence in a form that can be (in the medical sense) ‘borne’ by all who have any feeling for poetry at all, as hardly anything else does.”

“- - - gentle Sophias milk your cows, and if you ask a pretty smiling girl at a cottage door to tell you her name, the rosy lips lisp out Caroline. A great number of children, amongst the lower classes, are Carolines. That does not, however, wholly proceed from the love of the appellation; though I believe that a queen Margery or a queen Sarah would have had fewer namesakes.”

“I used to love saying her name. Caroline, with the "i" always long, because to make it short left it sounding like crinoline, a sweat-stained, mothballed Sunday hat pulled from an attic trunk. But Caroline with the "i" long created a sound roughly equivalent to the idea of a girl. The echo of a song in its three syllables, an age-old lyric not yet faded from memory.”

“The shooting star, which dissolved on reaching earth into dew or ‘jelly’, is very common with Carolines.”