Life and Literature Part 119

1645

OUR PRESENT NEED.

Pray, give us rest. A little rest From peace-destroying hurry; A moment of the quietest, As balm for work and worry.

Pray, give us rest. A little rest For people and for nation; A moment's time to stop and test The purpose of creation.

--_Wm. J. Lampton._

1646

Rest is sweet to those who labor.

--_Plutarch._

1647

_Take Rest._--A field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.

--_Ovid._

1648

The man who goes easiest and best, Is he who gives his tongue Vast quant.i.ties of rest.

1649

"If I rest too much, I rust,"--says the key.

1650

Quick resolves are often unsafe.

1651

Irresolute people often let their soup grow cold between the plate and the mouth.

1652

Sleep over it and you will come to a resolution.

--_Spanish._

1653

Those who act in a disinterested way seldom miss their reward.

1654

One knows not for whom he gathers.

--_French._

1655

It is wealth to a man to be able to live contentedly upon a frugal store.

1656

RUSKIN MEETS SOME TOURISTS.

"I was fated the other day to come from Venice to Verona with a family--father and mother and two girls--it matters not what country they came from--presumably rich--girls fifteen and eighteen. I never before conceived the misery of people who had evidently spent all their lives in trying to gratify themselves. It was a little warm--warmer than was entirely luxurious--but nothing in the least harmful. They moaned and fidgeted and frowned and puffed and stretched and fanned, and ate lemons, and smelled bottles, and covered their faces, and tore the cover off again, and had not one thought or feeling during five hours of traveling in the most n.o.ble part of all the world except what four poor beasts would have had in their end of a menagerie, being dragged about on a hot day. Add to this misery every form of polite vulgarity, in methods of doing and saying the common things they said and did. I never yet saw humanity so degraded (allowing for external circ.u.mstances of every possible advantage) given wealth, attainable education and the inheritance of eighteen centuries of Christianity."

--_Letter to Charles E. Morton in the Atlantic._

1657

They call him rich; I deem him poor; Since, if he dares not use his store, But saves it for his heirs, The treasure is not his, but theirs.

1658

The generous should be rich, and the rich should be generous.

1659

Very rich men seldom or never whistle; poor men always do.

1660

Who is truly rich? He who is satisfied with what he possesses.

--_From The Talmud._