Guest Blogger Dept.: Agnes Repplier was a renowned – and now unjustly neglected – essayist whose keen mind and colorful, precise prose style ensured a successful career. As a child, she quickly memorized and recited the poems her mother read to her, but resisted her mother’s efforts to teach her to read, which she did on her own at the age of ten. At 12 she was enrolled at Eden Hall, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, just north of her native Philadelphia, but was asked not to return after two years. She was kicked out of Agnes Irwin’s West Penn Square Seminary for Young Ladies after three times because of her rebelliousness. By the time she was 20, her writing began bringing in enough money to help support her family. She died in 1950 at the age of 95. She was a lifelong smoker. The following excerpt is from her book To Think of Tea!, the finest volume ever written on the subject.
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| Agnes Repplier |
IT IS THE MODERATE EXHILARATION induced by tea which makes it such a boon. We may, as Dr. Johnson asserts, be happy when we are drunk; but we are tolerably sure to be unhappy afterwards. The sense of contentment which follows the second cup of tea is not so irresponsible as to defy experience. It is a contentment compatible with ordinary circumstances. It does not lift us so high that the fall hurts, nor shelter us so securely that the return to noise and glare is shocking. For most of us life holds no good years, and few good days; but multitudinous good minutes if we recognize their presence. ‘
Après tout c’est un monde passable.’
We cannot think that tea gives to Americans what it gives to the English. It is not our affinity any more than a cocktail is theirs. The American genius ran to mixed drinks, and achieved marvellous results. The rapture of Dickens over his first sherry cobbler blotted temporarily from his mind his distaste for all things else American. Today, England, France, Italy and Spain offer to tourists an assortment of mixed drinks, their names startlingly familiar, their qualities unrecognizable. But never since the Revolution have we returned heartily to tea. When proffered in the afternoon, it is nervously rejected as prejudicial to sleep, or drunk so weak as to be truly ‘slop-kettle.’
