Word: weathercock
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...high-blown tradition. In the 1st century B.C., Greek Architect Andronicus capped his Tower of Winds in Athens with a mighty bronze Triton. The rooster atop the church steeple got its official sanction in the 9th century A.D. when the Pope decreed that every church should mount a weathercock to recall the chanticleer that crowed the night Peter thrice denied his Lord. Vane making reached the peak of its popularity as an art form when American settlers took it up. To record their triumphs of style and ingenuity, Manhattan's Museum of Early American Folk Arts has assembled...
...Weathercock. Author Lenard was born in Budapest in 1910. He recalls the outbreak of the first World War, a day when the city went mad with rejoicing, as "the last happy day that mankind was ever to know." The rest of his life has been an attempt to regain the paradise he feels he lost at that moment...
...Rome, where he stubbornly detached himself from the organized world around him. He let his passport expire. He applied for no ration book. He buried himself at the Vatican Museum as a librarian, read nothing printed after the French Revolution. But one day he saw German shells demolish the weathercock on a fine old church and abruptly decided that the time for passive resistance had ended...
...seems simultaneously intended as a romantic idyl, a secret thrill for naughty little boys of all ages, a modern myth of the mother goddess. The myth declares itself in symbols too insistent-the child is flatly called by the name of the goddess herself; her lover brings her a weathercock, bird of Apollo, god of light; and at the end an evergreen, tree of Dionysus, god of darkness, stands above his corpse...
Guided Tour. As a weathercock of taste, Walpole is more gilded than dependable. It soon becomes clear that he cultivates lesser things at the expense of greater ones, that his feeling for Gothic is really a love of the exotic, that his sense of the visionary is in essence a taste for the lurid, that Heaven for him is hardly more than a garden and Hell hardly more than a grotto. It was not so much that Walpole couldn't penetrate Dr. Johnson's mind as that he couldn't stomach his manners. Boswell, despite his talents...