Frank Boreham

“ All the sunniest experiences of the dead and buried years spring to vigorous life once more. All the sunniest faces—the dear, familiar faces of the long ago—smile at us again from out the glowing embers. And perhaps—who shall say?—perhaps some thought like this haunted the minds of a prophet of the Old Testament and an apostle of the New when, greatly daring, they declared that ‘our God is a consuming fire!’ Did they mean that, when we see Him as He is, all the holiest and sweetest and most precious treasure of the Past will be more our own? ”

“ A girl is fond of music. The impulse is a lofty and admirable one. But it may easily be used to lure her away from the best things into a life of frivolity, voluptuousness, and sensation. A boy is fond of Nature. He loves to climb the mountain, row on the river, or scour the bush. Nothing could be better. But if it leads him to forsake the place of worship, to forget God, to fling to the winds the faith of his boyhood, and to settle down to a life of animalism and materialism, he has been destroyed by means of his best affections. Or take our love of society and of revelry. ”

“ But as often as he gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton drew him back to the fire again.’ The fire; it is always the fire. The fire seems, even to the brutes, to be the emblem of the genius of our humanity.
For the triumph of humanity is the creation of home; and the soul of the home is the fireside. The luxurious summer evenings, with their wide range of out-of-door allurements, tend to discount the attractions of the home, and to depreciate the value of domestic intercourse. ”

“ We go through life leaving these shattered romances behind us. Our track is marked by the spatter of burst bubbles. What then? And in answer to that ‘What then?’ the obvious temptation is the temptation to cynicism. Since the doll has turned out to be a mere matter of sawdust and rags, since the talisman on the footpath told a lie, since the oracle of tree and stone deceived us, we make up our minds to fling to the scrap-heap such cherished beliefs as we still retain. We go in for a severe weeding out of everything that is imaginative, everything that is mystical, everything that is romantic. ”

“ Yet it was not half so painful as the contrast between the world as it is and a world that had run out of bombshells. A world that could no longer surprise us would be a world with its claws cut and its teeth drawn. Half the fun of waking up in the morning is the feeling that you have come upon a day that is brand new, a day that the world has never seen before, a day that is certain to do things that no other day has ever done. Half the pleasure of welcoming a new-born baby is the absolute certainty that here you have a packet of amazing surprises. ”

“ But, for all that, the linoleum is cold; and we do not fall in love with cold things. A volcano is a much more dangerous affair than an iceberg; but it is much more easy to fall in love with the things that make you shudder than with the things that make you shiver. That was the trouble with Maud, she was so chilly and chilling; her ‘cold and clear-cut face, faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null!’ And that is precisely the trouble with every system of religion, morality, or philosophy—save one—that has ever been presented to the minds of men. ”

“ The most expressive language, the only language in which the soul itself ever really speaks, is a language without alphabet or grammar. It needs neither to be learned nor taught, for all men speak it, and all men understand.
Was that, consciously or subconsciously, at the back of Mr. Franklin’s mind when he put Music next to Love? Certain it is that, in that unwritten language which is greater than all speech, Music is the natural expression of Love. Why is there music in the grove and the forest? It is because love is there. The birds never sing so sweetly as during the mating season. ”

“ It is instinct with life. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend,’ and whenever I drive a nail, or write a syllable, or weave a stitch for another, I have laid down just so much of my life for his sake.
But when we begin to exploit the possibilities of a Philosophy of Fancy-work, we shall find our feet wandering into some very green pastures and beside some very still waters. Fancy-work will lead us to think about friendship, than which few themes are more attractive. ”

“ The horror of the darkness was not fear. A child dreads the dark because he thinks that wolves and hobgoblins infest it. But these men had no such terrors. The thing that unbalanced them was the maddening monotony of the darkness. Nothing happened. In the light something happens every second. A thousand impressions are made upon the mind in the course of every minute. Each sensation, though it be of no more importance than the buzz of a fly at the window-pane, the flutter of a paper to the floor, or the sound of a footfall on the street, represents a surprise. ”

“ OUR LOST ROMANCES There are few days in a girl’s life more critical than the day on which the sawdust streams from the mangled carcase of her dearest doll. It is a day of bitter disillusionment, a day in which a philosophy of some kind is painfully born. The doll came into the home amidst all the excitements of a birthday. It was instantly invested with every attribute of personality. The task of naming it was as solemn a function as the business of naming a baby. ”

“ A man’s self-culture is his first and principal charge; and he will never succeed unless he both loves himself and treats himself lovingly. A man should be as gentle with himself as a gardener is with his orchids; as a nurse is with her patient; as a mother is with her troublesome child. A gardener who lost all patience with his delicate plants; a nurse who treated her poor patient peevishly; or a mother who met ill-temper with ill-temper could only expect to fail. I have urged John Sheergood to treat himself with a softer hand, and to greet himself with a smile. ”

“ Yet the waters always win. The land makes no impression on the sea; but the sea grinds the land to powder. I know that the sea is often spoken of as the natural emblem of all that is fickle and changeful; but it is a pure illusion. There are, of course superficial variations of tone and tint and temper; but, as compared with the kaleidoscopic changes that overtake the land, the ocean is eternally and everywhere the same. It, and not the rocks, is the symbol of immutability. ‘Look at the sea!’ exclaims Max Pemberton, in Red Morn. ‘How I love it! ”

“ And life is never the same again. The lion meets you in the open, and relies upon his strength. The wolf simply persists. He follows your trail day after day. You see his wicked eyes, like fireflies, stabbing the darkness of the night. He relies not upon surprise or strength, but on wearing you down at the last. Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth—having beaten off the panther—beware of the lion and the wolf. ”

“ But in this dark cell it languishes like a captive butterfly in a cardboard box. If you hold me under water I shall die, because my lungs can no longer do the work they have always been accustomed to do. In the dark cell the mind finds itself in the same predicament. It is drowned in inky air. The mind lives on sensations; but here there are no sensations. And if the world gets shorn of its surprise-power, it will become a maddening place to live in. We only exist by being continually startled. We are kept alive by the everlasting bursting of bombshells. ”

“ Few things about the house are more serviceable. I could point offhand to a hundred things no one of which has earned its right to a place in the home one-hundredth part as nobly as has the linoleum. Yet I am very fond of each of those hundred things, whilst I am not at all fond of the linoleum. I appreciate it, but I do not love it. So there it is! Said I not truly that love is never utilitarian? We grow fond of things because we grow fond of things; we never grow fond of things simply because they are of use to us. ”

“ Those one-and-twenty years have been almost evenly divided between the old manse at Mosgiel, in New Zealand, and my present Tasmanian [10] home. As I sit here, and let my memory play among the years, I smile at the odd way in which these southern lands have belied that first austere impression. In my fire to-night I see such crowds of faces—the faces of those with whom I have laughed and cried, and camped and played, and worked and worshipped in the course of these one-and-twenty years. There are fancy-faces, too; the folk of other latitudes; the faces I have never seen ”

“ That great word love has been made flesh to him, and it simply gleams with meaning. And so, all through the years, as life goes on, he finds the great key-words expounded to him through infinite processes of incarnation. ‘Ideas,’ says George Eliot, ‘are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in their vapour and cannot make themselves felt. ”

“ We dearly love a lord. There is no escaping that fundamental fact. Every day Protestant sheep stray into Roman Catholic pastures because there they can actually see the shepherd and actually feel his crook. The Roman Church, with its hoary traditions, its encrusted ritual, and its antique associations, crystallizes itself into a single voice. It possesses an enthroned incarnation. It has a Pope. Romanism is like a pine-tree. ”

“ Human life is robbed of all animalism and baseness when true [226] love enters. And there is no true love apart from the highest love of all.
Salad may seem a prosaic thing to follow on the heels of Love and Music; but the salad that has been prepared by fingers that one thinks it heaven to kiss is tinged and tinctured with the flavour of romance. All through life, Love makes life’s Music. All through life, Love and Music lead to Salad. And, all through life, Love and Music glorify the Salad to which they lead. ”

“ Its lovely deeds and graceful speech, its tender pathos and its awful tragedy, have won the hearts of men all over the world, and all down the ages. But find monotony there if you can! It is like a sky full of stars or a field of fairest flowers. The life that repels, as the linoleum repels, by the very severity of its regularity, has something wrong with it somewhere. ”

“ The world had gone hardly with Polonius. The stars in their courses seemed to be fighting against him. He had tried hard to be brave, but circumstances sometimes conspire against courage. Polonius, in spite of the most commendable endeavours, was poor; yet if poverty had been his only misfortune he could have borne it with a smile. But, in addition to poverty, troubles came thick and fast upon him. Like Claudius, he was a member of the church at Corinth; and it was in connexion with his labours of love for the sanctuary that he had first met Phebe. ”

“ We close the door, and draw the blinds, and we feel that we have effectually shut the whole world out. And yet when a friend looks in, we suddenly discover that our happiness consists, not in barring and bolting the heavy front door, but in flinging it wide open. We seat him in the best chair; we bring out the best dainties from the cupboard, the best books from the shelves, and the best stories from the treasure-house of memory. ”

“ It is a thousand pities that we have no authentic record of the discoverer of strawberries and cream. For ages the world enjoyed its strawberries, and for ages the world enjoyed its cream. But strawberries and cream was an unheard-of mixture. Then there dawned one of the great days of this planet’s little story, a day that ought to have been carefully recorded and annually commemorated. History, as it is written, betrays a sad lack of perspective. ”

“ It is wonderful how, after awhile, the winding river seems to weave itself into the very texture and fabric of one’s life. You stroll by it, bathe in it, row on it, fish in it, until every rock and every bank, every crag and every cliff, every twist and every bay, every deep and every shallow, takes its place among the intimacies and fond familiarities of life. ”

“ Opening doors are an earnest of opening gates. It is inconceivable that I shall be miraculously delivered from my dungeon, with its guards and its chains, and then be baulked by an iron gate out there in the blackness of the night. It is inconceivable that here, at the Communion Service, God should draw so near to the spirit of this young housemaid, and then leave her to face alone the drudgery of Monday morning. If Mary is half as wise as I take her to be, she will answer the scream of the clock with a song. ”

“ If clouds and darkness are round about Him, is it any wonder that He rejects the child-manuscript and accepts the snake-manuscript? And yet, and yet; what if the darkness that envelops Him be the darkness of the camera-obscura? The psalmist declares that it is just because clouds and darkness are round about Him that righteousness and judgement are the habitation of His throne. It is a darkness that obscures Him from me without in the slightest degree concealing me from Him.
So there the editor sits in his seclusion. Nobody is so unobtrusive. ”

“ Why is Jack—taking Jack now as the federal head and natural representative of Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Stewart Parnell, [214] Peter the Great, and all the boys who ever were, are, or will be—why is Jack so inordinately fond of a box of soldiers? By what magic have those tiny tin campaigners the power to exorcise the agonies of toothache? Now look; the answer is simple, and it is twofold. The small metallic warriors appeal to the innate love of Conquest and to the innate love of Command. And in that innate love of Conquest is summed up all Jack’s future relationship to his foes. ”

“ In slimy bogs and on slippery paths his foot shall never slide; and in the day when he wrestles with principalities and powers, and with the rulers of the darkness of this world, his foothold shall be firm and secure. ‘Thy shoes shall be iron and brass, and as thy days so shall thy strength be.’ Master Gurnall’s teaching is therefore perfectly plain. He looks at this divine footwear much as the Africans looked at Livingstone’s boots. The man whose feet are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace has carpeted for himself all the rough roads that lie before him. ”

“ When the day’s work is done, and the home is once reached, everything conspires to enhance its seductive charms. Outside, the dark and the cold, the bleak wind and the driving rain, threaten multiple discomforts to the gadabout who dares to venture forth; whilst within, the blazing fire, the cheerful hum of table talk, and the genial hospitalities of home make their most resistless appeal amidst the wintriest conditions. Was it not for this reason that the fire came to be regarded for centuries as the natural emblem of domestic felicity? ”

“ There is no royal road to learning. Knowledge resists the intruder. It presents an exterior that is altogether revolting, and only the brave persist in the attack. The text-books of the schools are rarely set to music; they do not tingle with romance. They look as dry as dust, and they are often even more arid than they look. I remember that, in my college days, the student who sat next to me on the old familiar benches suddenly died. ”

“ Strawberries and cream! It is an odd conjunction when you come to think of it. The gardener goes off to his well-kept beds and brings back a big basket, lined with cabbage leaves, and filled to the brim with fine fresh strawberries. The maid slips off to the dairy and returns with a jug of rich and foamy cream. To what different realms they belong! The gardener lives, moves, and has his being in one world; the milkmaid spends her life in quite another. The cream belongs to the animal kingdom; the strawberries to the vegetable kingdom. ”