James J. Walsh

“ Every bird his well-known language Uttering in the morning's pride, Revelling in joy and gladness By his happy partner's side. When, around me, all is smiling, When to life the young birds spring, Thoughts of love, I cannot hinder, Come, my heart inspiriting— Nature, habit, both incline me In such joy to bear my part: With such sounds of bliss around me Could I wear a sadden'd heart? ”

“ All the world now knows of the art of the Renaissance and of all that was accomplished by men who lived during the century after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Every form of art, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, as well as the arts and crafts, achieved a supreme expression at this time. Everywhere, particularly in Italy, men started up as if a new life had come into the world and proceeded to the accomplishment of artistic results which had apparently been impossible to preceding generations, and, alas for the notion of human progress! ”

“ History has been too much a mere accumulation of facts with regard to war, diplomacy and politics. While we have known much of heroes and battles, we have known little of education, of art, of artistic achievement of all kinds. We have known even less of popular movements. We have known almost nothing of the great uplift of the masses which created the magnificent arts and crafts of the Middle Ages, that we are just beginning to admire so much once more, and our admiration of them is the best measure of our own serious artistic development. ”

“ I believe that before all things, needful beyond all else, is true religion. This only can give wisdom, happiness and goodness to men and a nobler life to mankind. Nothing but this can sustain, guide and satisfy all lives, control all characters and unite all men. True religion must rule in every heart, brain and will, over every people of the whole earth; inspire every thought, hallow every emotion and be the guide of every act. ”

“ As love is the life of the heart, so is the endeavor after knowledge and truth the life of the mind. In the midst of the movements of time, of the daily work of life, of its perplexities and contradictions, we should lift our gaze fearlessly to the clear vault of heaven, and seek ever to obtain a firmer grasp of and a keener insight into the origin of all goodness and beauty, the capacities of our own hearts and minds, the intellectual fruits of mankind throughout the centuries, and the wondrous works of nature around us ”

“ He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for a great cause and him who dies for the sake of dying. ”

“ If, then, our life is shorter than a day Lost in all time; if the revolving year Hurries our days past hope to reappear; If all things born must fail and pass away-- What, O my prisoned soul, dost dream of? say! Why so much love our days of darkness here. If to take flight to an abode more dear, Well-feathered wings you on your shoulders sway? There is the good which ever soul desires. ”

“ Always enthusiastically devoted to the study of disease, Auenbrugger escaped the not infrequent misfortune of the student, a loss of sympathy with one's kind. His love for his fellow-men, for suffering humanity, for struggling students in his own profession, kept pace with his love for medical study. He never sacrificed the man for the scientist, nor did he lose his interest for other things in life, as happens sometimes with men intensely devoted to one pursuit. A man of original powers, as some one has truly remarked, can never be confined within the limits of a single field of activity. ”

“ There is hardly a phase of them that he has not touched upon; many of his descriptions and allusions have a truth and vividness unsurpassed even in this present day of nature worship. Here, as elsewhere in the Divina Commedia, science and learning and poetry go hand in hand. We have no mere dry catalogue of facts, but the wonderful mechanism of the starry heavens is brought before our eyes, rolling its spheres in celestial harmony, radiant with light and splendour, while the innumerable company of angels and the 'spirits of just men made perfect' raise the chorus of praise to the Alto Fattore. ”

“ More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and forever as time goes on, marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. ”

“ The talk of death from young lips has not the same disturbing effect as from older people. The games of children interest the old once more, and if there is occasional music and the chance to see the passing throng of carriages and motor cars and the pleasure boats and all the rest there is refreshment and reinvigoration in it all that soon brings back to the patient deep, satisfactory, even dreamless uninterrupted sleep at night, and appetite and strength. ”

“ Probably no larger man in all the best sense of that term has ever lived, painter, sculptor, architect, poet, simple, humble, devout, in friendship a model, as a teacher deeply beloved--this man, who succeeded so marvellously in everything that he attempted, is one of human nature's proudest boasts, yet himself realized poignantly how little he could really accomplish of all that surged up in his soul. No career in history so makes it clear that the breath of the Creator is in His creatures to inspire and exalt. ”

“ These old workmen had found the secret of using it in such a way as not thus to spoil surrounding colors, not to permit it to be too assertive, yet we have wonderful enduring blues that have come down to us practically unchanged through all these centuries. Where the workmen of the old time set themselves producing pure color effects, their windows look like jewels and coruscate in the light of the setting sun--for their most charming effects were particularly obtained in the west windows--with a glorious beauty that has appealed to every generation since. ”

“ I know of only one person who deserves praise for his work in experimental philosophy for he does not care for the discourses of men and their wordy warfare, but quietly and diligently pursues the works of wisdom. Therefore what others grope after blindly, as bats in the evening twilight, this man contemplates in their brilliancy because he is a master of experiment. Hence, he knows all of natural science whether pertaining to medicine and alchemy, or to matters celestial or terrestrial. ”

“ Strong and self-contained he moves serenely on; no display of temper mars his work, no hasty word is uttered, however great the provocation. Like the missionary calmly wiping his face, when spat upon in the Japanese street, or that Little Sister of the Poor, who, struck across the face when begging food for her old people, calmly answered, 'That is for myself, and I deserve it; please now give me something for Christ's poor,' such a worker sees only souls here below, and Christ above, waiting for them. ”

“ But as I have said before, the real essence of conservatism lies not in theology. The whole conflict is a struggle in the mind of man. It exists in human psychology before it is wrought out in human history. It is the struggle of realities against tradition and suggestion. The progress of civilization would still have been just such a struggle had religion or theology or churches or worship never existed. But such a conception is impossible, because the need for all these is part of the actual development of man. ”