Bolton Hall

“ But we do not need his assurance when the moaning and restlessness pass, when the stertorous breathing quiets, when the skin becomes moist, and the gentle, regular breathing tells us that natural sleep has come. If we can be spared, we go out under the stars and, whether Christian or pagan, up from the depths of our souls wells a prayer of thankfulness to “whatever gods there be” for the incomparable blessing of sleep. We feel as if we could “go softly all our days” before the powers who have decreed that sleep shall gently steep the eyelids of the one we love. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Harmony, peace, rest are the blessings that all men crave, even when they do not understand their own desires. To say that peace and rest are inherently impossible of attainment is to say that we are formed with desires that tantalize and torment us, as a mirage tantalizes the traveler dying of thirst in the desert, with no hope of satisfying those desires. It is in effect to say that a cruel monster governs this world and takes delight in our suffering. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sleep which covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; and is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. Sleep is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.”—“Don Quixote.”
Sleeping is the one thing that everyone practices almost daily all his life, and that, nevertheless, hardly anyone does as well as when he began. We have improved in our walking, talking, eating, seeing, and in other acts of skill and habit ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He has learned that, while it is true that “not enjoyment and not sorrow is our destined end or way,” yet to enjoy, in the sense of understanding life and living, is to live so that “each to-morrow find us farther than to-day.” To enjoy life is to use it wisely; to get the most out of it that will make for happiness and development. It will not help to that end to worry or lose sleep, because man’s span of life is short. Love with your whole heart, and live according to reason, and you will win the prize of sleep, and happiness and length of days shall be added thereunto. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The dead whom we have loved hold us as securely as they did when they were living; it is only that we do not see how. It has come within the experience of many that the death of father, mother, or some dearly loved one has led to the awakening of some wayward or misguided one who seemed to be wasting all the opportunities of life. We know that it was not the mere death which worked this seeming miracle. That simply woke the dormant love in the one who had hitherto desired only his own way. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ To fit one’s self for such a sphere should bring rest while we are doing it, because that fitting means becoming harmonious with the purposes of the larger life; and rest is simply harmony, at-one-ness with the Universe.
The possibilities of the life of all three natures are inexhaustible. We have never touched the limit of even the physical man. Man at one time had only his hands for tools, and so was limited in his powers. ”

“ Labor does not see that capital is its own product, drawn from the land and used to enable men to produce more wealth. And neither sees that the object of producing wealth is not wealth for its own sake, but that man may, through its use, develop himself to an ever higher state.
It is scarcely possible that men should see this under present economic conditions; how, then, can it be possible for men to understand their relations to one another or the advantages of harmony? ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the wealthy man is denied this natural satisfaction. He does not even have to seek what he wants; servants do that for him; he speaks and the thing is done. For him there is no joyous effort; no increase of pleasure in the very delay of fulfillment; no sense of achievement when he gets what he desires. For this reason he soon wearies, and, having run the whole gamut of pleasures, and exhausted his idle fancies, he becomes a prey to ennui, has no object in life, and finds no delight in the days. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But we know that the unselfish dead would only be distressed at our grieving.
When we look upon the change called death as no more mysterious than any of the other changes in our bodily or mental development, which we either welcome or are unconscious of, we shall lose our terror of it either for ourselves or for others.
Our terror for others is not really for those others so much as for ourselves. The sense of “our great loss” is really a piece of selfishness. For life cannot mean one thing for us and another for our brother; as we see our own lives, so must we see the lives of those we love. ”

“ And, if the blind works of evildoers do not triumph over the plans of Good, if they do not even hinder the working of the law of universal Good, why should we fret ourselves because of them?
But the unrest may be caused by our lack of that worldly success which we think would bring us happiness. Of course, if the real desire be worldly success, and there is no other way in which we can learn that it will not bring happiness, then we must attain worldly success. To-day, this demands a resolute will, concentration, a steady nerve, and a lack of human sympathy. ”