William De Witt Hyde

“ The depth of our sympathy for those below us in secular service and station measures our worth in the eyes of those spiritually higher than we.
Love is like a tree; if it is not to be scorched in the blaze of ambition and withered in the heat of competition, its roots of sympathy must go down as deep into the soil of the obscure and lowly lives on whose humble toil we depend as its branches spread into the upper air of social distinction and station. ”

“ THE VICE OF EXCESS.
Affectation the attempt to work up by our own efforts an enthusiasm for Nature.—True love of Nature must be born within us, by the working of Nature herself upon our hearts. By faith, rather than by works; by reception, rather than by conquest; by wise passiveness, rather than by restless haste; by calm and silence, rather than by noise and talk, our sensitiveness to Nature's charms is deepened and developed. That enjoyment of Nature which comes spontaneously and unsought is the only true enjoyment. ”

“ We must buy and sell, work and play, laugh and cry, love and hate down here among the shadows; but we must all the time feed our souls on the good, the true, the beautiful, which these distorted human shadows only serve to hide. These Platonic lovers of something better than their husbands or wives, or associates or friends, go through the world with a serene smile, and an air of other-worldliness which, if we do not inquire too closely into their domestic life and business efficiency, we cannot but admire. ”

“ Overwork is work for its own sake; work for false and unreal ends; work that exhausts the physical powers. Overwork makes a man a slave to his work, as laziness makes him a slave to his ease. The man who makes haste to be rich; who works from morning until night "on the clean jump"; who drives his business with the fierce determination to get ahead of his competitors at all hazards, misses the quiet joys of life to which the wealth he pursues in such hot haste is merely the means, breaks down in early or middle life, and destroys the physical basis on which both work and enjoyment depend. ”

“ For soon as thy philosophy issuing from a godlike intellect has begun with loud voice to proclaim the nature of things, the terrors of the mind are dispelled, the walls of the world part asunder, I see things in operation throughout the whole void: the divinity of the gods is revealed, and their tranquil abodes which neither winds do shake, nor clouds drench with rains nor snow congealed by sharp frost harms with hoary fall: an ever cloudless ether o'ercanopies them, and they laugh with light shed largely round. Nature too supplies all their wants, and nothing ever impairs their peace of mind. ”

“ To seize the pure ideal of beauty which Nature suggests, but never quite realizes; to select from the universe of space and the eternity of time those materials and forms which are perfectly adapted to portray the ideal beauty; to clothe the abodes and the whole physical environment of man with that beauty which is suggested to us in sky and stream and field and flower; to present to us for perpetual contemplation the form and features of ideal manhood and womanhood; to hold before our imagination the deeds of brave men, and the devotion of saintly women ”

“ If you have been deceived, it is not the deception that matters, but the forgiveness whereto it gave birth in your soul, and the loftiness, wisdom, completeness of this forgiveness,—by these shall your eyes see more clearly than if all men had ever been faithful. But if, by this act of deceit, there have come not more simpleness, loftier faith, wider range to your love, then have you been deceived in vain, and may truly say nothing has happened."
"Let us always remember that nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. ”

“ THE PENALTY.
The life of man can be no deeper and richer than the objects and thoughts on which it feeds.—Without appreciation and love for Nature we can eat and drink and sleep and do our work. The horse and ox, however, can do as much. Obtuseness to the beauty and meaning of Nature sinks us to the level of the brutes. Cut off from the springs of inspiration, our lives stagnate, our souls shrivel, our sensibilities wither. ”

“ Marcus Aurelius says: "Let the part of thy soul which leads and governs be undisturbed by the movements in the flesh, whether of pleasure or pain; and let it not unite itself with them, but let it circumscribe itself, and limit those effects to their parts." "Let it make no difference to thee whether thou art cold or warm, if thou art doing thy duty, and whether dying or doing something else. For it is one of the acts of life,—this act by which we die; it is sufficient then in this act also to do well what we have in hand." "External things touch not the soul, not in the least degree." ”

“ Inhumanity to brutes brutalizes humanity.—If we refuse by consideration and kindness to lift the brute up into our human sympathy, and recognize in it the rights and feelings which it has in common with us, then we sink to the unfeeling and brutal level to which our cruelty seeks to consign the brutes. Every cruel blow inflicted on an animal leaves an ugly scar in our own hardened hearts, which mars and destroys our capacity for the gentlest and sweetest sympathy with our fellow-men. ”

“ Bounding out of bed after an unbroken sleep, singing or whistling as he dresses, coming down with beaming face ready to laugh on the smallest provocation, the healthy man of high powers, conscious of past successes and, by his energy, quickness, resource, made confident of the future, enters on the day's business not with repugnance but with gladness; and from hour to hour experiencing satisfactions from work effectually done, comes home with an abundant surplus of energy remaining for hours of relaxation. Far otherwise is it with one who is enfeebled by great neglect of self. ”

“ If we refuse to go in company there is nothing left for us but to trudge along the dreary way alone.—If we will not bear one another's burdens, we must bear our own when they are heaviest in our unaided strength; and fall beneath their weight. Here as everywhere penalty is simply the inevitable consequence of conduct. The loveless heart is doomed to drag out its term of years in the cheerless isolation of a life from which the light of love has been withdrawn. ”

“ THE CULTIVATION OF LOVE
Love is so akin to our nature, so eager to enter our souls, that to want is to get it; to seek is to find it; to open our hearts to its presence is to discover it already there. Whoever knows what true prayer is—the intense, eager yearning for good of insistent, importunate hearts—knows that there never was and never can be one unanswered prayer. ”

“ The unscrupulous man acts as he happens to feel like acting.—Whatever course of conduct presents itself as pleasant, or profitable, or easy, he adopts. Anything is good enough for him. He seeks to embody no ideal, aims consistently at no worthy end, acknowledges no duty, but simply yields himself a passive instrument for lust, or avarice, or cowardice, or falsehood to play upon. Refusing to be the servant of virtue he becomes the slave of vice. Disowning the authority of duty and the ideal, he becomes the tool of appetite, the football of circumstance. ”

“ Yet Love makes no fuss about its sacrifices, takes them as a simple matter of course, not worth mentioning; for what Love gives up in mere sensuous indulgence is as nothing to the widened affections and enlarged interests gained. To be solemn or sad over what we give up, to proclaim or parade one's self-denials, would be an insult to Love; it would show that the persons we love and the causes we serve are not really as dear to our hearts as the pitiful things we forego for their sake—would show that our Love was a sham. ”

“ Independence and self-reliance are the basis of self-respect and self-control.
At the same time this habit of independence, especially if it is ingrained by years of single life, tends to perpetuate itself in ways that are injurious to the highest domestic and family life. Independence is a magnificent foundation for marriage; to carry it up above the foundation, and build the main structure out of it, is fatal. The insistence on rights, the urging of claims, the enforcement of private whims and fancies, are the death of love and the destruction of the family. ”

“ These two harmonies I ask you to leave: the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance. We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own souls. Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of beauty and grace; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds ”

“ In contemplation of the glory of the heavens, in admiration of the beauty of field and stream and forest, we are beholding a loveliness which it was his delight to create, and which it is elevating and ennobling for us to look upon. Nature is the larger, fairer, fuller expression of that same intelligence and love which wells up in the form of consciousness within our own breasts. Nature and the soul of man are children of the same Father. Nature is the interpretation of the longings of our hearts. ”

“ Charge up against ourselves as murder the bitter looks, the hateful words, the unkind thoughts, the selfish actions, which have lessened the vitality, diminished the joy, wounded the heart, and murdered the happiness of those whom we ought to love, whom perhaps at times we think we do love, and who can profess to be guiltless? ”

“ This common life of humanity in which each individual partakes is society. Society is the larger self of each individual. Its interests and ours are fundamentally one and the same.—If the society in which we live is elevated and pure and noble we share its nobleness and are elevated by it. If society is low, corrupt, and degraded, we share its corruption, and its baseness drags us down. So vital and intimate is this bond between society and ourselves that it is impossible when dealing with moral matters to keep them apart. ”