If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. Nature. IN good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. Ibid. ROSES and violets renew their race like oaks, and flights of painted moths are as old as the Alleghanies. Letters and Social Aims: Poetry and Imagination. How silent, how spacious, with room for all, yet without place to insert an atom, — in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odour of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor shown. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures: The Method of Nature. THE globe that swims so silently with us through the sea of space has never a port, but with its little convoy of friendly orbs pursues its voyage through the signs of heaven, to renew its navigation again for The Senses and the Soul. ever. ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1809-1865 THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS FOURSCORE and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 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 so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here 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, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 1811-1863 THE MUSE OF HISTORY THE actors in the old tragedies, as we read, piped their iambics to a tune, speaking from under a mask, and wearing stilts and a great head-dress. 'T was thought the dignity of the Tragic Muse required these appurtenances, and that she was not to move except to a measure and cadence. So Queen Medea slew her children to a slow music: and King Agamemnon perished in a dying fall (to use Mr. Dryden's words): the Chorus standing by in a set attitude, and rhythmically and decorously bewailing the fates of those great crowned persons. The Muse of History hath encumbered herself with ceremony as well as her sister of Theatre. She too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks to measure. She, too, in our age, busies herself with the affairs only of kings; waiting on them obsequiously and stately, as if she were but a mistress of Court ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registering of the affairs of the common people. Esmond, chap. i. JOHN RUSKIN REAL ENJOYMENT ALL real and wholesome enjoyments possible to man have been just as possible to him since first he was made of the earth as they are now; and they are possible to him chiefly in peace. To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over plough-share or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray- these are the things that make men happy.... Now and then a wearied king, or a tormented slave, found out where the true kingdoms of the world were, and possessed himself, in a furrow or two of garden ground, of a truly infinite dominion. Modern Painters, III, iv, 17. VENICE A CITY of marble did I say? nay, rather a golden city, paved with emerald. For truly, every pinnacle and turret glanced or glowed, overlaid with gold, or bossed with jasper. Beneath, the unsullied sea drew, in deep breathing, to and fro, its eddies of green wave. ... It lay along the face of the waters, no larger, as its captains saw it from their masts at evening, than bar of sunset that could not pass away. . . . A world from which all ignoble care and petty thoughts were vanished, with all the common and poor elements of life. No foulness, nor tumult, in these tremulous streets, that filled, or fell, beneath the moon. . . . And around them, far as the eye could reach, still the soft ... moving of stainless waters proudly pure; as not the flower, so neither the thorn nor the thistle, could grow in the glancing fields. Ethereal strength of Alps, dreamlike, vanishing in high procession beyond the Torcellan shore; blue islands of Paduan hills, poised in the golden west. Modern Painters, V, ix, 9. WHAT THE BIRDS SEE We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the districts of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the scirocco wind. Stones of Venice, II, vi. FIRST SIGHT OF THE ALPS NONE of us seem to have thought the Alps would be visible without profane exertion in climbing hills. We dined at four, as usual, and, the evening being entirely fine, went out to walk, all of us and mother and Mary and I. my father We must have still spent some time in town-seeing, for it was drawing towards sunset when we got up to some sort of garden promenade west of the town, I believe; and high above the Rhine, so as to command the open country across it to the south and west. At which open country of low undulation, far into blue, gazing as at one of our own distances from Malvern of Worcestershire, or Dorking of Kent, — suddenly behold - beyond! There was no thought in any ---- of us for a moment of |