“Count That Day Lost” by George Eliot. Public Domain. (buy now)

If you sit down at set of sun
And count the acts that you have done,
And, counting, find
One self-denying deed, one word
That eased the heart of him who heard,
One glance most kind
That fell like sunshine where it went —
Then you may count that day well spent.

But if, through all the livelong day,
You’ve cheered no heart, by yea or nay —
If, through it all
You’ve nothing done that you can trace
That brought the sunshine to one face —
No act most small
That helped some soul and nothing cost —
Then count that day as worse than lost.

On this day in 1631, Mumtaz Mahal died; her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, was so grieved by her death that he spent the next 22 years building her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal, in Agra. The two had married in 1612, and she was his favorite of his three wives; her name means “Chosen One of the Palace.” She died giving birth to their 14th child.

More than 20,000 workers from India, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe were employed in building the mausoleum and its surrounding complex. The outlying buildings, including the mosque, are made of red sandstone; the tomb, built of white marble inlaid with semi-precious stones, is the most recognizable feature, and it’s suffered greatly in recent years from the pollution of nearby foundries and automobile traffic.

Shah Jahan described the monument thus:

Should guilty seek asylum here,
Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.
Should a sinner make his way to this mansion,
All his past sins are to be washed away.
The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs;
And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.
In this world this edifice has been made;
To display thereby the creator’s glory.

On this day in 1885, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor. Formally known as “Liberty Enlightening the World,” she was a gift from France, and was funded by the French people. Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi first had the idea for a monument to commemorate the friendship between the United States and France in 1865, but he didn’t begin actual construction until the early 1870s; he chose Bedloe’s Island — now called Liberty Island — because the statue could welcome the boats full of immigrants, who would pass by the statue on the way to Ellis Island. He was delighted to learn that the island was the property of the United States government, which meant all the states — not just New York — could claim equal ownership in the statue.

Lady Liberty is made of sheets of copper over a framework of steel supports; the framework was designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, of Eiffel Tower fame. She was constructed in France and then was disassembled to make her journey to New York, where she was reassembled to her full height of 151 feet, 1 inch. Mounted on her pedestal, she stands 305 feet tall. Her torch was wired for electrical power in 1916. The seven rays of her crown represent the seven seas and the seven continents; the broken shackles at her feet evoke freedom from slavery and oppression; and the tablet in her left hand represents the law. Bartholdi completed her right arm and torch, as well as her head, before the rest of the statue was designed, and the arm went on display in 1876 as part of the United States Centennial celebrations. Liberty’s face was modeled after Bartholdi’s mother.

Emma Lazarus’s oft-quoted sonnet, “The New Colossus” (1883), which was written to raise money for construction of the statue’s pedestal, is engraved on a brass plaque inside it:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

It’s the birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Hersey, (books by this author) born to American missionaries in Tientsin, China (1914), who spoke Chinese before he spoke English, moved to the States when he was 10, and graduated from Yale. After college, he spent a summer as a secretary for writer Sinclair Lewis, then he went to work for Time magazine, reporting on World War II from all over Europe and Asia.

He wrote more than a dozen books, but he’s best known for his 31,000-word nonfiction piece “Hiroshima,” which appeared in The New Yorker magazine on August 31, 1946. The cover of the late-summer magazine issue featured a cheerful picnic with people sunbathing, strumming mandolins, dancing, playing croquet and tennis. Then, readers opened to the “Talk of the Town” page to find the beginning of Hersey’s voluminous essay and this note from The Editors:

“TO OUR READERS. The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city […]”

John Hersey’s Hiroshima begins:

“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.” 

It’s the birthday of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882), born in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was one of Russia’s leading operatic basses. While Stravinsky was in law school, he started composing music, and showed some of his work to Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, whose son was a fellow law student. Rimsky-Korsakov was impressed enough to take Stravinsky on as a private pupil.

Stravinsky is best known for his early work, including The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913); the latter was a highly experimental piece that he produced with Ballets Russes, with Nijinsky dancing the lead, and it caused riots at its premiere. Stravinsky’s style evolved rapidly from the “barbarism” of his early groundbreaking works to a more austere, but no less revolutionary, aesthetic. He worked with Russian folk motifs until World War I, and then turned to the European canon of classical music to inspire his unconventional compositions. His only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951), was set to a libretto by W.H. Auden and is considered a classic of the 20th century.

He moved to Switzerland in 1910, France in 1920, Hollywood in 1939, and New York City in 1969, at the age of 86. He considered Venice his spiritual home, and that’s where he is buried.