Page images
PDF
EPUB

E courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation. Let your heart feel for the affections and distresses of every one, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse; remembering always the estimation of the widow's mite, that it is not every one that asketh that deserveth charity; all however, are worthy of the inquiry, or the deserving may suffer.

Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men, any more than fine feathers make fine birds. A plain, genteel dress is more admired, obtains more credit, than lace and embroidery, in the eyes of the judicious and sensible.-George Washington in a letter to his nephew, Bushrod Washington, 1783.

HE names of the Periclean Age are

high. There is a higher one yet, that of Pericles. Statesman, orator, philosopher, soldier, artist, poet and lover, Pericles was so great that, another Zeus, he was called the Olympian. If to him Egeria came, would it not, a poet somewhere asked, be uncivil to depict her as less than he? It would be not only uncivil but untrue.

Said Themistocles," You see that boy of mine? Though but five, he governs the universe. Yes, for he rules his mother, his mother rules me, I rule Athens and Athens the world." After Themistocles it was Pericles' turn to govern and be ruled

His sovereign was Aspasia.

-Edgar Saltus.

O me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was poetry; He formed it, and that was sculpture; He varied and colored it, and that was painting; and then, crowning all, He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand divine, eternal drama.

-Charlotte Cushman.

COMMERCE is a game of skill,

which every man can not play, which few men can play well. The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call commonsense; a man of strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune; and so, in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this, and believe in magic, in all parts of life. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent-for every effect a perfect cause-and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.-Emerson.

[blocks in formation]

HE faculty to dream was not given to mock us. There is a reality back of it. There is a divinity behind our legitimate desires.

By the desires that have divinity in them, we do not refer to the things that we want but do not need; we do not refer to the desires that turn to Dead

Sea fruit on our lips or to ashes when eaten, but to the legitimate desires of the soul for the realization of those ideals, the longing for full, complete self-expression, the time and opportunity for the weaving of the pattern shown in the moment of our highest transfiguration.

A man will remain a rag-picker as long

as he has only the vision of the ragpicker

Our mental attitude, our heart's desire, is our per

T is a curious reflection that the

Leaf after leaf drops off, flower

after flower,

ordinary private person who collects objects of a modest luxury has nothing about him so old as his books. If a wave of the rod made everything around him disappear that did not exist a century ago, he would suddenly find himself with one or two sticks of furniture perhaps, but otherwise alone with his books. Let the work of another century pass, and certainly nothing would be left but these little brown volumes-so many caskets full of tenderness and passion, disappointed ambition, fruitless hope, self-torturing envy, conceit, aware, in maddening, lucid moments, of its own folly -Edmund Gosse

Some in the chill, some in the

warmer hour:

Alive they flourish, and alive

they fall,

And Earth who nourished them

receives them all.

Should we, her wiser sons, be

less content

To sink into her lap when life is spent?

"Leaf After Leaf Drops Off,"

petual prayer which Nature answers. She takes it for granted that we desire what we are headed toward, and she helps us to it. People little realize that their desires are their perpetual prayers-not head prayers, but heart prayers-and that they are granted.

Most people do not half realize how sacred a thing a legitimate ambition is. What is this eternal urge within us which is trying to push us on and on, up and up? It is the urge, the push in the great force within us, which is perpetually prodding us to do our best and refuses to accept our second best.

-Orison Swett Marden.

Things printed can never be stopped; they are like babies baptized, they have a soul from that moment, and go on forever.-Meredith.

by Walter Savage Landor

Y share of the work of the world may be limited, but the fact that it is work makes it precious. Darwin could work

only half an hour at a time; yet in many diligent half-hours he laid anew the foundations of philosophy.

Green, the historian, tells us that the world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.-Helen Keller.

HE character and qualifications of the leader are reflected in the men he selects, develops and gathers around him. Show me the leader and I will know his men. Show me the men and I will know their leader. Therefore, to have loyal, efficient employees-be a loyal and efficient employer.-Arthur W. Newcomb.

Of all kinds of pride I hold national pride the most foolish; it ruined Greece; it ruined Judea and Rome.-Herder.

lutely level. The water seems to wait a moment on its verge, then it passes with a single bound, three hundred and fifty feet below.

It is a sheer, unbroken, compact, shining mass of silver foam. But your eyes are all the while distracted from the fall itself, great and beautiful as it is, to its marvelous setting; to the surprising,

E have reached Cascade
Creek at last; and a beauti-
ful grove of pine trees, be-
neath whose shade a clear
stream, whose waters are
free from the nauseous taste of alkali,
furnishes a delightful place to camp.
Now, dismounting and seeing that your
horse is well cared for, while the men are
unloading the
packmules and
pitching the tents,
walk up that trail
winding up the hill-
side, follow it for
a little among the
solemn pines, and
then pass out from
the tree shadows
and take your
stand upon that
farther rock, cling-
ing to it well mean-
while and being
very sure of your
footing, for your
head will swim and
grow dizzy, and
there opens before
you one of the

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread,-

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt;
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the "Song of the Shirt!"

"Work-work-work

Till the brain begins to swim!
Work-work-work

Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,—

overmastering canyon into which the river leaps, and through which it flows, dwindling to but a foamy ribbon there in its appalling depths. As you cling here to this jutting rock, the falls are already many hundred feet below you. The falls unroll their whiteness down amid the canyon gloom o These rocky sides are almost perpendicular; indeed, in many places the boiling springs have gouged them out so as to leave overhanging cliffs and tables at the top. Take a stone and throw it over; you have to wait long before you hear it strike. Nothing more awful have I ever seen than the yawning of that chasm; and the stillness, solemn as midnight, profound as death. The water dashing there as in a kind of agony, against those rocks, you can not hear.

Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream!

(Continued on next page)

most stupendous scenes of Nature, the Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone ☛☛

And now where shall I begin, and how shall I, in any wise, describe this tremendous sight; its overpowering grandeur, and at the same time, its inexpressible beauty?

Look yonder! Those are the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone. They are not the grandest in the world, but there are none more beautiful. There is not the breadth and dash of Niagara, nor is there the enormous depth of leap of some of the waterfalls of Yosemite.

But there is a majesty of its own kind, and beauty, too. On either side are vast pinnacles of sculptured rock. There, where the rock opens for the river, its waters are compressed from a width of two hundred feet, between the Upper and Lower Falls, to less than one hundred feet where it takes the plunge. The shelf of rock over which it leaps is abso

The mighty distance lays the finger of silence on its white lips. You are oppressed by a sense of danger. It is as though the vastness would soon force you from the rock to which you cling. The silence, the sheer depth, the gloom, burden you. It is a relief to feel the firm earth beneath your feet again, as you carefully crawl back from your perchingplace

But this is not all, nor is the half yet told. As soon as you can stand it, go out on that jutting rock again and mark the sculpturing of God upon those vast and

solemn walls. By dash of wind and wave, by forces of the frost, by file of snowplunge and glacier, and the mountaintorrents, by the hot breath of the balmy Spring, those walls have been cut into the most various and surprising shapes. I have seen the "Middle Ages" castles along the Rhine; there those castles are reproduced exactly. I have seen the soaring summits of the great cathedralspires in the country beyond the sea; there they stand in prototype, only loftier and more sublime &

And then, of course and almost beyond all else, you are fascinated by the magnificence and utter opulence of color Those are not simply gray and heavy depths, and reaches, and domes, and pinnacles of solid rock.

The whole gorge flames It is as

[blocks in formation]

"O Men, with sisters dear!

O Men, with mothers and wives! It is not linen you 're wearing out, But human creatures' lives.

Stitch-stitch-stitch

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,— Sewing at once, with a double thread, A shroud as well as a Shirt!

"But why do I talk of Death—

That phantom of grisly bone!
I hardly fear his terrible shape,
It seems so like my own—
It seems so like my own

Because of the fasts I keep:
O God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!"
"The Song of the Shirt," by Thomas Hood

though rainbows had fallen out of the sky and hung themselves there like glorious banners. The underlying color is the clearest yellow; this flushes onward into orange. Down at the base the deepest mosses unroll their draperies of the most vivid green; browns, sweet and soft, do their blending; white rocks stand spectral; turrets of rock shoot up as crimson as though they were drenched with blood o

It is as if the most glorious sunset you ever saw had been caught and held upon that resplendent, awful gorge. Throughout nearly all the hours of that afternoon until the sunset shadows came, and afterwards among the moonbeams, I waited there, clinging to that rock, jutting out into that overpowering, gorgeous chasm. I was appalled and fascinated, afraid and yet compelled to cling there. It was an epoch in my life.

-Doctor Wayland Hoyt

[merged small][merged small][ocr errors]
[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

OUNG men, life is before you. Two voices are calling you-one coming out from the swamps of selfishness and force, where success means death; and the other from the hilltops of justice and progress, where even failure brings glory. Two lights are seen in your horizon

one the fast fading marsh light of power, and the other the slowly rising sun of human brotherhood. Two ways lie open for you-one leading to an even lower and lower plain, where are heard the cries of despair and the curses of the poor, where manhood shrivels and possession rots down the possessor; and the other leading to the highlands of the morning, where are heard the glad shouts of humanity and where honest effort is rewarded with immortality.

—John P. Altgeld.

ALL works of taste must bear a price

in proportion to the skill, taste, time, expense and risk attending their invention and manufacture.

Those things called dear are, when justly estimated, the cheapest: they are attended with much less profit to the Artist than those which everybody calls cheap

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.

A composition for cheapness and not excellence of workmanship is the most frequent and certain cause of the rapid decay and entire destruction of arts and manufacturers.-Josiah Wedgwood.

[blocks in formation]

LOVE you for what you are, but I love you yet more for what you are going to be.

I love you not so much for your realities as for your ideals. I pray for your desires that they may be great, rather than for your satisfactions, which may be so hazardously little.

A satisfied flower is one whose petals are about to fall. The most beautiful rose is one hardly more than a bud wherein the pangs and ecstacies of desire are working for larger and finer growth.

Not always shall you be what you are

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]
[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]
« PreviousContinue »