Bolton Hall

“ Can you walk through a working-class district or a Lancashire cotton town, with their huddle of airless streets, without a feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this enormous perversion of life into the arid channels of death? Can you take pride in an Empire on which the sun never sets when you think of the courts in which, as Will Crooks says, the sun never rises? ”

“ So real is our suffering when those we love best are torn from us that for a time we are inconsolable. Philosophy, religion, the affectionate ministrations of those about us, avail not to bind up the broken heart. There is but one cure for such grief—to minister to others. Unselfish devotion to a great cause—the cause of our fellows, whether in the mass or individually—is a sovereign balm for a bleeding heart.
When we understand life we know this, for we have learned that neither in joy nor in sorrow can any man live to himself. Action of any sort relieves tension and suffering. ”

“ It is harmony, peace, rest. We have but to look at the workings of our own marvelous physical bodies to perceive that law. The more we study the human body, the more we wonder at its mechanism. Yet every part of this intricate machinery, in harmony with each other part, finds its own work, unless man, through his misunderstanding, throws it out of order.
Perhaps the strongest proof of the naturally harmonious working of the body is found in the responsive distress or disease which result from the wrong use of any one function. It is not necessary to cut the heart itself to injure it. ”

“ If we turn our eyes homeward and contemplate the many thousands of small efforts made in this country toward the alleviation of city children's misery, we can say truthfully that we in America are perhaps fully alive to the necessity which has prompted the people of Berlin to action; we only need to be reminded of Mayor Pingree's potato patches on empty city lots, our children's outing camps, our occasional children's excursions, and the like. Still, there is nothing in this country to compare with the thousands of Berlin "arbor gardens" and their singularly convincing force. ”

“ We may not always be able to sleep, but we can always lie in the arms of our Great Mother Nature. There is a real philosophy as well as devotion in the old prayer we teach our children, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” A still older form of the almost instinctive recognition of the fact that sleeping is but intrusting ourselves to the Universal love was, “He committed himself to God in sleep.” Like sleep, a wakeful night may be a growing time. It affords the quiet, the time, the seclusion to think over the meanings of things, or even to seek the cause of the wakefulness itself. ”

“ By thought and courage, we can help ourselves to own a home, surrounded by acres of fruit and vegetables, flowers and poultry, and learn the best methods so as to insure success.
In olden times any one could "farm," but it is necessary to-day to teach people to obtain a livelihood directly from the earth. Scientific methods of agriculture have revealed possibilities in the soil that make farming the most fascinating occupation known to man. People in every city are longing for the freedom of country life, yet hesitate to enter into its liberty because no one points the way. ”

“ A typical scene of this sort is a warm Sunday in late spring, when all the usual activities of country life have ceased; the air is heavy with the scent of clover and field flowers, the apple blossoms, and the thousand odors of the fresh country field; the air moving so lazily that it scarcely stirs the trees; the cow chewing the meditative cud; the bees buzzing dreamily; the very horses, standing under the shed of the little white country church, whinnying softly to each other, as knowing that a spell of peace is over all, a spell that must not be broken ”

“ They, too, joined the ever-increasing flow to the cities, and entered into the savage competition of our great towns.
In our time the pendulum has swung to its extreme. At every depression of business, armies of the unemployed perish in sight of the land they abandoned in the hope of a brighter future. Their children have forgotten the traditions of the soil, and the energies of our people must now be concentrated to reverse the aimless tide of human sufferers, which under stress continues to flow city-ward, and to send it to repeople the silent places whence it came. ”

“ And, when the soul has gained what it sought,191 we shall find beauties and virtues hitherto unsuspected in every human being; we shall learn that, above the turmoil and noise of our rushing, jarring, modern civilization, we can hear the morning stars sing together for joy, the music of the spheres, that which shall yet soothe man’s fear and teach him to find restful sleep. ”

“ The low-priced 'cheap greenhouse' is a makeshift of some sort. Perhaps its roof is constructed of hotbed sash, a perfectly feasible method of construction, which for ordinary, commonplace gardening will answer admirably. Or, its foundation is merely the plain earth. Such a building does admirably in the summer time, and even in the late spring and early autumn; but woe betide the enthusiastic amateur in winter, who, being possessed of one of these light greenhouse structures, has indulged in a few costly, exotic plants. ”

“ In his lectures on Botany at the Royal School of Medicine in Great Britain, Professor Leo H. Grindon said: “Man is captured in sleep not by death but by his better nature; to-day runs in through a deeper day to become the parent of to-morrow, and to issue every morning, bright as the morning of life, and of life-size, from the peaceful womb of the cerebellum.” This is the result not of a passive state, but of an active instinct; it accepts sleep as a time of growth, not merely a time of rest. ”

“ Light and air and labor—these are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul. It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the compass of our speech. The God that dwells in gardens is sufficient for all our needs—let the theologians say what they will. ”

“ It may be that we shall arise to new experiences, or perhaps to further development in a world that we cannot touch with our hands. But in either case we may not doubt that the awakening will be good, for all life is good. For, after all, we should know none of the joys of living if we had not tried them. Life is consciousness, and hardly one of us would prefer never to have lived; to have had no share in that which has meant man; the growth and culmination of unnumbered centuries. ”

“ Gardening is not a rule of thumb business. Each gardener must bring his plants up in his own way in the light of his own experience and in accordance with the conditions of his own garden. A garden lover who has a bit of land will speedily learn if his eyes and his mind, as well as his hands, are always busy, no matter how meager his knowledge at the beginning. ”

“ As an old servant in my family once said, “If the rich were happy, we should know there was no God.” “How hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of heaven,” said Jesus; meaning thereby that the possession of wealth destroys our sympathy with our poorer brethren and prevents a man from seeing his true relation to those who have it not; makes it difficult for him to recognize his oneness with all mankind, and so cuts him off from that heaven of love and peace on earth that can come only from agreement of his own life with the life of others outside his circle. ”

“ Love, being the essence of godlikeness, ought to bring us the joy of the gods, and love would bring only joy if we could forget ourselves. We understand ourselves so little that we do not know when our love is self-love. We are always seeking some return upon our affection, as if it were an investment that must pay dividends to prove its profitableness. The price of our love is generally the right to criticise, to influence, to control; or, if we forego these seeming advantages, we expect at least consideration from those whom we have blessed with our love. ”

“ We do not want to be cut off in the flower of our existence; we think of death, not as a change of existence, but as the end of it, and we think there is no sure way of avoiding that. All of us have felt the truth of Dickens’ idea of the bells which toll almost gladly for the aged, but seem to weep when the young die. We are sure we should not fear death, nor be unwilling to die if we had the privilege of living to a “ripe old age.” For time is not measured by the clock or by the calendar ”

“ Many a person who is always having trouble, who is worried and uneasy, longing for rest and comfort but never finding it; to whom “life is a dreary puzzle scarcely worth the solving,” is simply “pulling the wrong string,” the string of self-will, of separateness. His soul is darkened by his refusal to turn on the light, and the shadow covers the whole of his life. ”

“ Now God is love, and the kingdom of God is universal love, the love that knows no separateness; therefore let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Believe in God. The man who seeks first the wide Universal Peace does not worry nor fret. He has, by that very seeking, put himself in tune with the Infinite, and he finds that the sounds which have seemed to him like harsh discords are, to his listening ear, blended into harmony. ”

“ Who has worked day and night for their comfort and happiness as she has? And the chances are that she considers them ungrateful and herself a martyr, when all the time she herself builds the barrier between them and herself by striving to make them happy in her way. That it is not their way, and so could not be in harmony with the natural trend of things, does not once occur to her. ”

“ The laborer, the merchant, and the professional man think of the end of the day as resting-time, just as the busy housewife does. It matters not how much we may love our work, we expect to be exhausted by our efforts before the day is over. We feel hurried, anxious, fretted, and overworked all day long, and comfort ourselves with the prospect of rest at night. And all the time we might rest and never find the day so short as to cause worry, nor the hours so long nor the work so hard as to tire us. ”

“ The burden-bearing masses have not yet seen the cause of their burden, even though they feel its intolerable weight at times and make efforts to throw it off. All this deepens their unrest.
The very oneness of all life will put sound sleep and true rest ever beyond the general reach until all are given equal opportunity in Nature’s great gift to man, the Earth. ”

“ It does not always make us happy to learn it. We often feel as if we had been tricked, and we think that effort spent in what we now see was not the most effective way, was wasted. This leads us sometimes to persist in a mistaken course, because we are unwilling to believe that we have lost so much time and missed so much result. But no effort is ever wasted: it is only by the effort to do well that we can learn to do better.
Nothing is commoner than to hear our friends say, “I don’t sleep—the work is so hard and exacting I get dead tired and then toss about all night.” ”

“ If a man is not the head of his own house, how is happiness possible? Marriage is indeed a lottery, and I have drawn a blank,” says he.
But there is one thing certain, if we find ourselves suffering through our love in any relation of life, whether as husband or wife, mother, daughter, lover, friend, we may be sure that it is because our love is not broad enough; because we believe in ownership, or desire gratitude, or are confident of our wisdom and ability to control the life of another. ”