The columbine adorns the rocks, the laurel buds grow pink, Along the stream white arums gleam, and violets bend to drink. This is the song of the Yellowthroat, Fluttering gayly beside you; Hear how each voluble note Offers to guide you: Which way, sir? Let me teach you, Jolly fishing? This way, sir! I'll teach you. Then come, my friend, forget your foes, and leave your fears behind, And wander forth to try your luck, with cheerful, quiet mind; For be your fortune great or small, you'll take what God may give, And all the day your heart shall say, ""Tis luck enough to live." This is the song the Brown Thrush flings Out of the thicket of roses; Hark how it warbles and rings, Mark how it closes: Luck, luck, What luck? Good enough for me! I'm alive, you see. No repining; Never borrow Idle sorrow; Cover it up! Hold your cup! Joy will fill it, ON BOOKS HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE THERE is no magic about this process of enriching one's self by absorbing the best books; it is simply a matter of sound habits patiently formed and persistently kept up. Making the most of one's time is the first of these habits; utilizing the spare hours, the unemployed minutes, no less than those longer periods which the more fortunate enjoy. To "take time by the forelock' in this way, however, one must have his book at hand. when the precious minute arrives. There must be no fumbling for the right volume; no waste of time because one is uncertain what to take up next. The waste of opportunity which leaves so many people intellectually barren who ought to be intellectually rich, is due to neglect to decide in advance what direction one's reading shall take, and neglect to keep the book of the moment close at hand. The biographer of Lucy Larcom tells us that the aspiring girl pinned all manner of selections of prose and verse which she wished to learn at the sides of the window beside which her loom was placed; and in this way, in the intervals of work, she familiarized herself with a great deal of good literature. A certain man, now widely known, spent his boyhood on a farm, and largely educated himself. He learned the rudiments of Latin in the evening, and carried on his study during working hours by pinning ten lines from Virgil on his plow, a method of refreshment much superior to that which Homer furnished the plowman in the well-known passage in the description of the shield. These are extreme cases, but they are capital illustrations of the immense power of enrichment which is inherent in fragments of time pieced together by intelligent purpose and persistent habit. The conviction deepens in me that the best possible education which any man can acquire is an intimate acquaintance with those few great minds who have escaped the wrecks of time and have become, with the lapse of years, a kind of impersonal wisdom, summing up the common experience of the race and distilling it drop by drop into the perfect forms of art. The man who knows his Homer thoroughly knows more about the Greeks than he who has familiarized himself with all the work of the archæologists and the philologists and mythologists of the Homeric age. The man who has mastered Dante has penetrated the secret of medievalism; the man who counts Shakespeare as his friend can afford to leave most of the books about Elizabethan England unread. To know Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe is to know the best the world has thought, and said, and done, is to enter into that inheritance of experience and knowledge which is the truest and at the bottom the only education. Most of us know too many writers, and waste our strength in a vain endeavor to establish relations of intimacy with a multitude of men, great and small, who profess to have some claim upon us. It is both pleasant and wise to have a large acquaintance, to know life broadly and at its best, but our intimate friends can never, in the nature of things, be many. We may know a host of interesting people, but we can really live with but few. And it is these few and faithful ones, whose names I see in the dying light of the old year and the first faint gleam of the new. IVRY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY NOW glory to the Lord of Hosts, from whom all glories are! And glory to our Sovereign Liege, King Henry of Navarre! Now let there be the merry sound of music and of dance, Through thy cornfields green, and sunny vines, O pleasant land of France! And thou, Rochelle, our own Rochelle, proud city of the waters, Again let rapture light the eyes of all thy mourning daughters. As thou wert constant in our ills, be joyous in our joy, For cold, and stiff, and still are those who wrought thy walls annoy. Hurrah, hurrah, a single field hath turned the chance of war! Hurrah, hurrah, for Ivry, and Henry of Navarre! Oh, how our hearts were beating, when, at the dawn of day, We saw the army of the League drawn out in long array; There rode the brood of false Lorraine, the curses of our land; And dark Mayenne was in the midst, a truncheon in his hand: And, as we looked on them, we thought of Seine's empurpled flood, And good Coligni's hoary hair all dabbled with his blood; And we cried unto the living God, who rules the fate of war, To fight for His own holy name, and Henry of Navarre. The king is come to marshal us, in all his armor drest, And he has bound a snow-white plume upon his gallant crest. He looked upon his people, and a tear was in his eye; He looked upon the traitors, and his glance was stern and high. |