Favorite Prose
Lord make me an instrument of your
peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where
there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope; where there is
darkness, light; and where there is sadness,
joy.
O Devine Master, grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood
as to understand; to be loved as to love; for it is
in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we
are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to
eternal life. Amen.
The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in the bright air--these things will never change.
The
glitter
of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the
stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea
in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of
young boughs, and something there that comes and goes
and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the
sharp and tongueless cry--these things will be the
same.
All things belonging to the earth will
never
change-- the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind
that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees
whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and
the dust of lovers long since buried in the
earth--all things proceeding from the earth in
seasons, all things that lapse and change and come
again upon the earth--these things will always be the
same, for they come up from the earth that never
changes, they go back into the earth that lasts
forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures
forever.
The tarantula, the adder, and the asp
will never change. Pain and death will always be the
same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse,
under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the
wastes of time, under the hoof of beast above the
broken bones of cities, there will be something
growing like a flower, something bursting from the
earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into
life again like April.
We
are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have
come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final
resting place for those who here gave their lives
that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting
and proper that we should do this. But in a larger
sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we
cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and
dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far
above our poor power to add or detract.
The
world will little note, nor long remember, what we
say here; but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here
to the unfinished work which they who fought here
have thus far nobly advanced. It is rather for us to
be here dedicated to the great task remaining before
us, that from these honored dead we take increased
devotion; that we highly resolve that these dead
shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under
God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that
government of the people, by the people, and for the
people shall not perish from the
earth.
I know they are as lively, and as
vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons'
teeth; and being sowed up and down may spring up
armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless a
wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a
good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable
creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good
book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as
it were, in the eye.
Many a man lives a burden
to the earth; but a good book is a precious
life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured
up on purpose to a life beyond life. "Tis true, no
age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps, there is no
great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft
recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of
which whole nations fare the worse.
We should
be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against
the living labours of public men, how we spill that
seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in
books; since we see a kind of homicide may be
committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to
the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the
execution ends not the slaying of an elemental life,
but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essense, the
breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather
than a life,
Beauty is everywhere. A lovely
landscape does not appeal only by the agreeable
sensations that it inspires, but by the ideas that it
awakens. The line and the colors do not move you in
themselves, but by the profound meaning that is in
them. In the silhouette of trees, in the line of a
horison, the great landscape painters saw a
meaning--grave or gay, brave or discouraged, peaceful
or troubled--according to their characters.
The
artest, in representing the universe as he imagines
it, formulates his own dreams. In nature he
celebrates his own soul. And so he enriches the soul
of humanity. For in coloring the material world with
his spirit he reveals to his delighted fellow-beings
a thousand unsuspected shades of feeling. He
discovers for them riches in themselves until then
unknown. He gives them new reasons for loving life,
new inner lights to guide them.
The one absolutely unselfish friend that
man can have in this selfish world, the one that
never deserts him, the one that never proves
ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. A man's dog
stands beside him in prosperity and in poverty, in
health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold
ground, where the wintry winds blow, and the snow
drives fiecely, if only he may be near his master's
side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to
offer; he will lick the wounds and sores that come on
encounter with roughness of the world. He guards the
sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince.
When all other friends desert, he remains. When
riches take wings, and reputation falls to pieces, he
is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey
through the heavens.
If fortune drives the
master forth as outcast in the world, friendless and
homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege
than that of accompanying him, to guard him against
danger, to fight against his enemies. And when the
last scene of all comes, and takes his master in its
embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground,
no matter if all other friends pursue their way,
there
by the graveside will the noble dog be found, his
head between his paws, his eyes sad, but open in
alert watchfulness, faithful and true even in
death.
Finally, above angels and archangels, and above all the heavenly host, above all things visible and invisible, and above all that Thou art not, O my God.
Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.
