Richard Chenevix Trench

“ The men who for this earthly life would claim
Well nigh the whole, and if the work of heaven
Be relegated to one day in seven,
Account the other six may without blame,
Unsanctified by one diviner aim,
To self to mammon and the world be given,
These scanty worshippers might nigh be driven,
Were they but here, to profitable shame.
This eve, the closing of no festal day,
This common work-day eve, in the open street
Seen have I groups of happy people meet,
Putting for this their toil and tasks away,
Men, women, boys, at one rude shrine to pray,
And there their fervent litanies repeat. ”

“ A lie has no legs. and first, hear a proverb of our own: A lie has no legs; it is one true alike in its humblest application and its highest; be the lie the miserable petty falsehood which disturbs a family or a neighbourhood for a day; or one of the larger frauds, the falsehoods not in word only but in act, to which a longer date and a far larger sphere are assigned, which for a time seem to fill the world, and to carry everything in triumph before them. Still the lie, in that it is a lie, always carries within itself the germs of its own dissolution. It is sure to destroy itself at last. ”

“ No voices of history, the very faintest voices of tradition, reach us from ages so far removed from our own. But in the silence of all other voices there is one voice which makes itself heard, and which can tell us much. Where Indian, and Greek, and Latin, and Teutonic designate some object by the same word, and where it can be clearly shown that they did not, at a later day, borrow that word one from the other, the object, we may confidently conclude, must have been familiar to the Indo-European race, while yet these several groups of it dwelt as one undivided family together. ”

“ For many a wanderer through life’s waste,
He had hewn down in guilty haste;
That fountain free, that springing well
Of goodness inexhaustible,
His hand had stopt it, ne’er again
To slake the thirst of weary men.
That genial sun, which evermore
Did on a cold, chill world outpour
Its rays of love and life and light,
’Twas he who quenched in darkest night.
What marvel that he owned the force
Of late regret and vain remorse,
And (all he could) now freely gave
The life the other did not crave? ”

“ It has been well and worthily said by an illustrious German scholar: “The care of the national language I consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege of the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it the object of his unceasing concern, to preserve his language pure and entire, to speak it, so far as is in his power, in all its beauty and perfection.... A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. ”

“ And shouldst thou there small scope for action see,
Do not for this give room to discontent;
Nor let the time thou owest to God be spent
In idly dreaming how thou mightest be,
In what concerns thy spiritual life, more free
From outward hindrance or impediment.
For presently this hindrance thou shalt find
That without which all goodness were a task
So slight, that Virtue never could grow strong:
And wouldst thou do one duty to His mind,
The Imposer’s—over-burdened thou shalt ask,
And own thy need of grace to help, ere long. ”

“ But the glory of proverbs, that, perhaps, which strikes us most often and most forcibly in regard of them, is their shrewd common sense, the sound wisdom for the management of our own lives, and of our intercourse with our fellows, which so many of them contain. In truth, there is no region of practical life which they do not occupy, for which they do not supply some wise hints and counsels and warnings. There is hardly a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it. ”

“ I may truly say of the mind of an ungrateful person, that it is kindness-proof. It is inpenetrable, unconquerable; unconquerable by that which conquers all things else, even by love itself. And the reason is manifest; for you may remember that I told you that ingratitude sprang from a principle of ill-nature; which being a thing founded in such a certain constitution of blood and spirit, as being born with a man into the world, and upon that account called nature, shall prevent all remedies that can be applied by education.—South, Sermons, 1737, vol. ”

“ The holy Angels all will stand upon their feet,
And while they hymn the praise, the glory and the worth
Of him who by a word created heaven and earth,
Will ever high and higher be borne and swept along
Heaven’s azure-vaulted roofs the full concent of song: 92
Then will that mighty voice of jubilee be heard,
Until from end to end the spacious world is stirred,
Until even those that lie excluded from his face,
The Righteous of the world who knew not of his grace
And law, while living—now will triumph in his name,
And with their loud Amen will join the glad acclaim. ”

“ It is that at certain earlier periods of a nation’s life its genius is synthetic, and at later becomes analytic. At earlier periods all is by synthesis; and men love to contemplate the thing, and the mode of the thing, together, as a single idea, bound up in one. But a time arrives when the intellectual obtains the upper hand of the imaginative, when the tendency of those that speak the language is to analyse, to distinguish between these two, and not only to distinguish but to divide, to have one word for the thing itself, and another for the quality of the thing ”

“ What a hope full of immortality does this little word proclaim! how rich is it in all the highest elements of poetry, and of poetry in its noblest alliance, that is, in its alliance with faith— able as it is to cause all loathsome images of death and decay to disappear, not denying them, but suspending, losing, absorbing them in the sublimer thought of the victory over death, of that harvest of life which God shall one day so gloriously reap even there where now seems the very triumphing place of death. ”

“ A weary course your life has run;
And yet it need not be in vain,
That you have suffered all this pain;{20}
And, if mine years might make me bold
To speak, methinks I could unfold
Why in such efforts you could meet
But only misery and defeat.
Yet deem not of us as at strife,
Because you set before your life
A purpose and a loftier aim,
Than the blind lives of men may claim
For the most part—or that you sought,
By fixed resolve and solemn thought,
To lift your being’s calm estate
Out of the range of time and fate. ”

“ Let me quote here Fuller’s excellent unfolding of this proverb: “Memory in a liar is no more than needs. For first lies are hard to be remembered, because many, whereas truth is but one: secondly, because a lie cursorily told takes little footing and settled fastness in the teller’s memory, but prints itself deeper in the hearers, who take the greater notice because of the improbability and deformity thereof; and one will remember the sight of a monster longer than the sight of an handsome body. ”

“ We indeed hear it not seldom said that ignorance is the mother of admiration. No falser word was ever spoken, and hardly a more mischievous one; implying, as it does, that this healthiest exercise of the mind rests, for the most part, on a deceit and a delusion, and that with larger knowledge it would cease; while, in truth, for once that ignorance leads us to admire that which with fuller insight we should perceive to be a common thing, one demanding no such tribute from us, a hundred, nay, a thousand times, it prevents us from admiring that which is admirable indeed. ”

“ And with pure hearts are seeking what is fair
In Nature, then believe we shall not need
Long anxious quests, exploring earth and air
Ere we shall find wherewith our hearts to feed:
The beauty which is scattered everywhere
Will in our souls such deep contentment breed,
We shall not pine for aught remote or rare;
We shall not ask from some transcendant height
To gaze on such rare scenes, as may surpass
Earth’s common shows, ere we will own delight:
We shall not need in quest of these to roam,
While sunshine lies upon our English grass,
And dewdrops glitter on green fields at home. ”

“ The floods are armed with silver shields,
Through which the Sun’s sword cannot fare; IV.
For he who trod heaven’s middle road
In golden arms, on golden chair,
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V.
Now through small corner of the sky
Creeps low, nor warms the foggy air. VI.
To mutter ’twixt their teeth the streams,
In icy fetters, scarcely dare. VII.
Hushed is the busy hum of life;
’Tis silence in the earth and air. VIII.
From mountains issues the gaunt wolf,
And from its forest depths the bear. IX.
Where is the garden’s beauty now? ”

“ The losses and diminutions of a language differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions—namely, that they are of two kinds, while its gains are only of one. Its gains are only in words; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a new power; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in powers—in words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of tenses which it once used ”

“ He who resolves to be honest because, and only because, it is the best policy, will be little likely long to continue honest at all. But the proverb does not pretend to usurp the place of an ethical rule; it does not presume to cast down the higher law which should determine to honesty and uprightness, that it may put itself in its place; it only declares that honesty, let alone that it is the right thing, is also, even for this present world, the wisest. Nor dare we, let me further add, despise prudential morality, such as is embodied in sayings like this. ”