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PART X

THE BETTER LIFE

HEARD ARE THE VOICES

BUT heard are the voices,
Heard are the Sages,
The worlds and the ages:
Choose well, your choice is
Brief and yet endless.

66 Here eyes do regard you
In eternity's stillness,
Here is all fullness,

The brave, to reward you ;

Work, and despair not."

THOMAS CARLYLE (from Goethe).

HOW TO LIVE

HE liveth long who liveth well!
All other life is short and vain;

He liveth longest who can tell

Of living most for heavenly gain.

He liveth long who liveth well!
All else is being flung away;
He liveth longest who can tell

Of true things truly done each day.
Waste not thy being; back to Him
Who freely gave it, freely give;
Else is that being but a dream;

'T is but to be, and not to live.
Be what thou seemest! live thy creed!
Hold up to earth the torch divine ;
Be what thou prayest to be made;
Let the great Master's steps be thine.
Fill

up each hour with what will last;
Buy up the moments as they go;
The life above, when this is past,
Is the ripe fruit of life below.

Sow truth, if thou the truth wouldst reap:
Who sows the false shall reap the vain ;
Erect and sound thy conscience keep;
From hollow words and deeds refrain.
Sow love, and taste its fruitage pure;
Sow peace, and reap its harvests bright;
Sow sunbeams on the rock and moor,
And find a harvest-home of light.

A HAPPY LIFE

HORATIUS BONAR

How happy is he born and taught,
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armor is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill!

Whose passions not his masters are,
Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Not tied unto the world with care
Of public fame, or private breath;

Who envies none that chance doth raise,
Or vice; who never understood
How deepest wounds are given by praise ;
Nor rules of state, but rules of good;

Who hath his life from rumors freed,
Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruin make oppressors great;

Who God doth late and early pray,
More of his grace than gifts to lend;
And entertains the harmless day
With a well-chosen book or friend;

This man is freed from servile bands,
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands;
And having nothing, yet hath all.

SIR HENRY WOTTON.

GRADATIM

HEAVEN is not reached at a single bound;
But we build the ladder by which we rise
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies,
And we mount to its summit round by round.

I count this thing to be grandly true,
That a noble deed is a step toward God,
Lifting the soul from the common sod
To a purer air and a broader view.

We rise by the things that are under our feet;
By what we have mastered of good and gain,
By the pride deposed and passion slain,
And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet.
We hope, we aspire, we resolve, we trust,

When the morning calls us to life and light;
But our hearts grow weary, and ere the night
Our lives are trailing in sordid dust.

We hope, we resolve, we aspire, we pray,

And we think that we mount the air on wings
Beyond the recall of sensual things,

While our feet still cling to the heavy clay.

Wings for the angels, but feet for men!

We borrow the wings to find the way

We may hope, and resolve, and aspire, and pray,
But our feet must rise, or we fall again.

Only in dreams is a ladder thrown

From the weary earth to the sapphire walls;
But the dreams depart and the vision falls,
And the sleeper wakes on his pillow of stone.
Heaven is not reached at a single bound;

But we build the ladder by which we rise
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies,
And we mount to its summit round by round.
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND.

A HINDOO'S SEARCH FOR TRUTH

ALL the world over I wonder, in lands that I never have trod, Are the people eternally seeking for signs and steps of a God?" Westward across the ocean, and northward beyond the snow, Do all stand gazing, as ever, and what do the wisest know?

Here in this mystical India, the deities hover and swarm, Like the wild bees heard in the tree-tops, or the gusts of a gathering storm;

In the air men hear their voices, their feet on the rocks are seen, Yet we all say, "Whence is the message, and what may the

wonders mean?"

A million shrines stand open, and ever the censer swings,

As they bow to mystical symbol or the figures of ancient kings;

And the incense rises ever, and rises the endless cry
Of those who are heavy laden, and of cowards loth to die.

For the destiny drives us together, like deer in a pass of the hills:
Above is the sky, and around us the sound and the shot that kills;
Pushed by a Power we see not, and struck by a hand unknown,
We pray to the trees for shelter, and press our lips to a stone.
Here are the tombs of my kinsfolk, the first of an ancient name,
Chiefs who were slain on the war-field, and women who died
in flame;

They are gods, these kings of the foretime, they are spirits who guard our race:

Ever I watch and worship; they sit with a marble face.

And the myriad idols around me, and the legion of mutter

ing priests,

The revels and rites unholy, the dark unspeakable feasts! What have they wrung from the silence?

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Hath even a whisper

whence and whither?

Alas! for the gods

Shall I list the word of the English, who come from the utter

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The Secret, hath it been told you, and what is your message to me?

It is naught but the wide-world story how the earth and the

heavens began,

How the gods are glad and angry, and a Deity once was man. I had thought, "Perchance in the cities where the rulers of India dwell,

Whose orders flash from the far land, who girdle the earth with a spell,

They have fathomed the depths we float on, or measured the unknown main

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Sadly they turn from the venture, and say that the quest is vain. Is life, then, a dream and delusion, and where shall the dreamer

awake?

Is the world seen like shadows on water, and what if the mirror

break?

Shall it pass as a camp that is struck, as a tent that is gathered

and gone

From the sands that were lamp-lit at eve, and at morning are level and lone ?

Is there naught in the heaven above, whence the hail and the levin are hurled,

But the wind that is swept around us by the rush of the rolling

world?

The wind that shall scatter my ashes, and bear me to silence and sleep,

With the dirge, and the sounds of lamenting, and voices of women who weep?

RESPONSES

A. C. LYALL.

NEVER from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle ;

Out from the heart of Nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;

The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity ;

--

Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew
The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Ever the fiery Pentecost,

Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting choirs,
And through the priest the mind inspires.
The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told,

In

groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (The Problem).

DE PROFUNDIS

THE face which, duly as the sun,

Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With daily love, is dimmed away
And yet my days go on, go on.

The tongue which, like a stream, could run
Smooth music from the roughest stone,
And every morning with "Good-day
Made each day good, is hushed away
And yet my days go on, go on.

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