Page images
PDF
EPUB

HO can describe the pleasure OUR friendships hurry to short and

and delight, the peace of mind and soft tranquillity, felt in the balmy air and among the green hills and rich woods of an inland village? Who can tell how scenes of peace and quietude sink into the minds of painworn dwellers in close and noisy places, and carry their own freshness deep into their jaded hearts?

Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through whole lives of toil, and never wished for change; men to whom custom has indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks-even they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at last for one short glimpse of Nature's face, and, carried far from the scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once into a new state of being, and crawling forth from day to day to some green, sunny spot, have had such mem ories wakened up within them by the mere sight of sky, and hill, and plain, and glistening water, that a foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they have sunk into their tombs as peacefully as the sun, whose setting they watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before, faded from their dim and feeble sight!

The memories which peaceful country scenes call up are not of this world or of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us to weave fresh

poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to such a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves Io

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know e Jo

The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experienced. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.-Emerson.

garlands for the graves of those we loved, I CAN not commend to a business

may purify our thoughts and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this there lingers in the least reflective mind a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.-Charles Dickens.

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.-Tennyson.

house any artificial plan for making men producers-any scheme for driving them into business-building. You must lead them through their self-interest. It is this alone that will keep them keyed up to the full capacity of their productiveness.-Charles H. Steinway.

The cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. -Oscar Wilde.

Snobbery is the pride of those who are not sureof their position.-Berton Braley.

[graphic]

greatness. It was native in him to rejoice in the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs. One almost felt that, so long as good books were written, it was no great concern to him whether he or others wrote them. Born with an artist's craving for beauty of expression, he achieved that beauty with infinite pains. Confident in romance and

The royal feast was done; the King
Sought some new sport to banish care,
And to his jester cried: "Sir Fool,
Kneel now, and make for us a prayer."

The jester doffed his cap and bells,

And stood the mocking court before; They could not see the bitter smile

Behind the painted grin he wore.

He bowed his head, and bent his knee
Upon the monarch's silken stool;
His pleading voice arose: "O Lord,
Be merciful to me, a fool!

HEN the telegram came, early one Monday morning, what was our first thought, as soon as the immediate numbness of sorrow passed and the selfish instinct began to reassert itself (as it always does) and whisper "What have I lost? What is the difference to me?" Was it not something like this" Put away books and paper and pen. Stevenson is dead. Stevenson is dead, and now there is nobody left to write for." Our children and grandchildren shall rejoice in his books; but we of this generation possessed in the living man something that they will not know. So long as he lived, though it were far from Britainthough we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely heard our nameswe always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each writer amongst us -small or more than small-had been proud to have carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was not slipshod. Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to put their utmost even into writings that quite certainly would never meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters-that for five years the needle of literary endeavor in Great Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole.

"No pity, Lord, could change the heart From red with wrong to white as wool; The rod must heal the sin: but Lord,

Be merciful to me, a fool!

"'T is not by guilt the onward sweep

Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay; 'Tis by our follies that so long

We hold the earth from heaven away.

"These clumsy feet, still in the mire, Go crushing blossoms without end; (Concluded on next page)

Yet he founded no school, though most of us from time to time have poorly tried to copy him. He remained altogether inimitable, yet never seemed conscious of his

in the beneficence of joy, he cherished the flame of joyous romance with more than Vestal fervor, and kept it ardent in a body which Nature, unkind from the beginning, seemed to delight in visiting with more unkindnessa "soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed" almost from birth. And his books leave the impression that he did this chiefly from a sense of duty: that helabored and kept the lamp alight chiefly because, for the time, other and stronger men did not s

Had there been another Scott, another Dumas

if I may change the image-to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if Stevenson would have offered himself. I almost think in that case he would have consigned with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of new Ivanhoes and new D'Artagnans: for-let it be said again-no man had less of the ignoble itch for merely personal success. Think, too, of what the struggle meant for him: how it drove him unquiet about the world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung him, as by a sudden freshet," upon Samoa-to die" far from

[ocr errors]

favorite, Sir Thomas Browne: a passage beginning "He was fruitlessly put in hope of advantage by change of Air, and imbibing the pure Aerial Nitre of those Parts; and therefore, being so far spent, he quickly found Sardinia in Tivoli, and the most healthful air of little effect, where Death had set her Broad Arrow.' A statelier sentence of the same author

Argos, dear land of home." ¶ And then
consider the brave spirit that carried
him-the last of a great race-along this
far and difficult path; for it is the man
we must consider now, not, for the
moment, his writings. Fielding's voyage
to Lisbon was long and tedious enough;
but almost the whole of Stevenson's life
has been a voyage to Lisbon, a voyage in
the very penumbra
of death. Yet Stev-
enson spoke always
as gallantly as his
great predecessor.
Their "cheerful
stoicism," which
allies hisbooks with
the best British
breeding, will keep
them classical as
long as our nation
shall value breed-
ing so do

These hard, well-meaning hands we
thrust

Among the heart-strings of a friend.

"The ill-timed truth we might have kept-
Who knows how sharp it pierced and
stung?

The word we had not sense to say-
Who knows how grandly it had rung!

"Our faults no tenderness should ask,
The chastening stripes must cleanse
them all;

But for our blunders-oh, in shame
Before the eyes of heaven we fall.

It shines to our
dim eyes now, as
we turn over the
familiar pages of
Virginibus Pueris-
que, and from page
after page-in sen-
tences and frag-
ments of sentences
-"It is not alto-
gether ill with the
invalid after all."
"Who would find
heart enough to be-
gin to live, if he
dallied with the consideration of death?”

"Earth bears no balsam for mistakes;
Men crown the knave, and scourge the
tool

That did his will; but Thou, O Lord,

Be merciful to me, a fool!”

The room was hushed; in silence rose

The King, and sought his gardens cool,
And walked apart, and murmured low,
"Be merciful to me, a fool!”
"The Fool's Prayer," by Edward Rowland Sill

"What sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is!".. "It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates over a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. . For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young."

I remember now (as one remembers little things at such times) that, when first I heard of his going to Samoa, there came into my head (Heaven knows why) a trivial, almost ludicrous passage from his

[ocr errors]

occurs to me now: "To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St. Innocent's Churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus."

[ocr errors]

This one lies, we are told, on a mountain-top, overlooking the Pacific. At first it seemed so much easier to distrust a News Agency than to accept Stevenson's loss. О сарtain, my captain!” One needs not be an excellent writer to feel that writing will be thankless work, now that Stevenson is gone. But the papers by this time leave no room for doubt. "A grave was dug on the summit of Mount Vaea, thirteen hundred feet above the sea. The coffin was carried up the hill by Samoans with great difficulty, a track having to be cut through the thick bush which covers the side of the hill, from the base to the peak." For the good of man, his father and grandfather planted the high sealights upon the Inchcape and the Tyree Coast. He, the last of their line, nursed another light and tended it. Their lamps still shine upon the Bell Rock and the

[graphic]

Skerryvore; and-though in alien seas,
Sperryvore,
upon a rock of exile-this other light
shall continue, unquenchable by age,
beneficent, serene.

"The Death of Robert Louis Steven-
son," by Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

seas: light on to fost OW blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep: it covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and it is the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even. There is only one thing, which somebody once put into my head, that I dislike in sleep: it is, that it resembles death; there is very little difference between a man in his first sleep and a man in his last sleep. -Cervantes.

USIC is to me an ethereal rain, an ever-soft distillation, fragrant and liquid and wholesome to the soul, as dew to flowers; an incomprehensible delight, a joy, a voice of mystery, that seems to stand on the boundary between the sphere of the senses and the soul, and plead with pure, unrefined human nature to ascend into regions of seraphic uncontained life.

O wondrous power! Art thou not the nearest breath of God's own beauty, born to us amid the infinite, whispering gallery of His reconciliation! Type of all love and reconciliation, solvent of hard, contrary elements-blender of soul with soul, and all with the Infinite Harmony.-John S. Dwight.

AUGHTER, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul; and thus far it may be looked upon as a weakness in the composition of human nature. But if we consider the frequent reliefs we receive from it, and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with transient, unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.-Addison.

HE highest compact we can make with our fellow is, let there be truth between us two forevermore. It is sublime to feel and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him; we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance; I rely on him as on myself; if he did not thus or thus, I know it was right.-Emerson.

There are whole worlds of fact waiting to be discovered by inference.

-Woodrow Wilson.

[blocks in formation]

CAN conceive of a national destiny surpassing the glories of the present and the pasta destiny which meets the responsibilities of today and measures up to the possibilities of the future ☛

to those who sit in darkness. ¶ Behold a republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes-a republic whose history, like the path of the just, is “as the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day."-" The Ideal Republic," by William Jennings Bryan.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle in the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Behold a republic, resting securely upon
the foundation stones quarried by revo-
lutionary patriots
from the mountain
of eternal truth-a
republic applying
in practice and pro-
claiming to the
world the self-evi-
dent proposition
that all men are
created equal; that
they are endowed
with inalienable
rights; that govern-
ments are insti-
tuted among men
to secure these
rights; that gov-
ernments derive
their just powers
from the consent of
the governed.
Behold a republic
in which civil and
religious liberty
stimulate all to
earnest endeavor,
and in which the
law restrains every
hand uplifted for a
neighbor's injury—
a republic in which

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
"I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,"

every citizen is a sovereign, but in which
no one cares to wear a crown.
Behold a republic standing erect, while
empires all around are bowed beneath
the weight of their own armaments—a

[blocks in formation]

appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a prettier shell, or a smoother pebble than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. -Newton.

by William Wordsworth

republic whose flag is loved, while others a writer, I have only one desire flags are only feared.

Behold a republic increasing in population, in wealth, in strength and influence, solving the problems of civilization and hastening the coming of universal brotherhood-a republic which shakes thrones and dissolves aristocracies by its silent example, and gives light and protection

to fill you with fire, to pour into you the distilled essence of the sun itself. I want every thought, every word, every act of mine to make you feel that you are receiving into your body, into your mind, into your soul, the sacred spirit that changes clay into men and men into gods.-Thomas Dreier.

« PreviousContinue »