Henry C. Tinsley

“ These years are but little stepping-stones across the narrow brook of Time that pours into the vast ocean of Eternity, and it is a good sign when a man approaches the next, and the next, and the next with increasing reverence and sense of the responsibility of his progress. It is a good sign when a man begins to discover in the impediments of life, what is necessary and what is absolutely hurtful to him in the journey of life, and when, with the discovery, he summons up enough resolution to fix a day to throw away the bad. ”

“ And so our human heart talks on in its hot grief. It is a great comfort to remember, after awhile, that there is a Father who watches over it as tenderly as he has watched over all his children, and who will guide the little one into a new and higher life, as He will us older children who come to Him later in life, like tired and weary children seeking a mother's breast. ”

“ Of all the impositions that I know, this vacation business, in the way we take it, is greatest. Somehow, by some inexplicable way, it has grown into a custom with men who have business, to understand that a vacation means two weeks, fourteen days, out of three hundred and sixty-five, or one week out of every twenty-six. And then back again to work. It is like taking a poor devil out of a box once a year, and after giving him a breath of fresh air, putting him back and letting the lid down on him again. ”

“ All scrambling and fighting over the grains of daily corn, even though the hand of the fatal purchaser is already descending into the mouth of the coop. Like their human brethren who do not wear feathers, the tallest and the strongest gets his head up through the slats and gets wider views of the world. He often mistakes the single street he can see for the Universe and crows out his discovery until he is picked out of the coop and hurried off to lose his head, an operation which teaches him that in fact he has discovered nothing. ”

“ He cannot realize that he is failing, and least of all can he realize the dread truth that it is time for him to fail. To a man's own mind he is always at that mythical stage, his "prime," as long as health lasts. It is piteous to hear his excuses for his failing body—it was this imprudence, it was that cold, it was too much or too little exercise—he cannot understand that it is the herald of the Messenger, and that a little way off through the mist he might see the Messenger himself holding the Lotus flower in his hand. ”

“ We do nothing in a day—not even reform in a day. All good and evil is a matter of ascent and descent-the latter only the faster because the grade is easier. It is not an easy experiment in the world to be a good man. No man ever fixed a day to become a good one. It is an uphill road, a long road, and one who proposes to walk it must fix no later hour than now lest night-fall find him far from the end of it.
But the young man who determines to walk it in this day, has a far easier road than he would have had thirty years ago. It is the fashion to say that the road grows no better. ”

“ Another shifting, and a little farmhouse appears, with a man riding from under the trees. He rides into the mist and the farmhouse disappears. A railroad train rushes out of a bank of white wool and into another, in complete silence. The white sea gets uneasy under the wind, and the sun begins to brighten up the clouds above. Then the woolen surface begins to move. A mountain spur makes its appearance clear against the sky; the farm houses silently glide from under the sea; a flock of sheep, whose shepherd dog's bark you have heard from under the mist, is revealed. ”

“ The quiet lighting up of the stars, with no step ladders and no hurried match scratching of the police; the ease with which the moon climbs up her route, no puffing, no machinery clanking; the deepening of the blue to better show the celestial sparks that glow on it—and the knowledge that all this will go on without failure and without your having to turn over in bed to work some lever to help it move, makes the coming of night a comfort to the sick. ”

“ The roseate bridge thrown across the water, swinging with the waves, the intense and silver bright-ness of the centre of the arc framed in the evening clouds that roll around it, and the gleaming wings of the birds, as they flash across the disc and disappear in the shining centre on their way homeward, somehow bring to my mind the gates ajar and the souls flying from earth to their final rest. There may be beautiful pictures to come after this life; if there are, sunset at sea is as near as our mortal minds can yet come to them. ”

“ What do we care what a man thought two hundred years ago, when we have what a man thinks to-day? What is to us the policy of a political party when the moss has commenced to grow over it. Who would attempt to enforce in this day the medieval creeds and religious practices and church government? What are we put here for, if it is not to learn, every year, every day, every hour if we can. And of what use is all this learning if we are not to advance by means of it? And how could we move a step if we did not tell our neighbor what we think we have learned—that is, tell him our opinions. ”

“ As it happens to all men, the World hardly gives it a thought. But to him, that One Man is all the world, and it is hard to get his thoughts away from himself. As the Procession of Life passes on, and the hum of its marching columns grows fainter on his ears, let us hope that there may come to him that unworldly quiet that Death pityingly sends in advance, and amid which Hope steals noiselessly away from the bedside to make room for Faith. ”

“ Outgrown it all—sickness, pain, disappointments, a long, weary life—all at a single leap. But this does not comfort you. Ah, no; nothing comforts us for those we have seen slip into the dark. It will be but human in you to miss him this Christmas, and to think of the hundred ways in which he would have had pleasure if he had only lived. I think that in the death of children there is an added grief to that we feel when men and women die. They are so little, so helpless, one cannot help feeling anxious about how they will get along in the new world they have gone to ”

“ It must be a queer spectacle to those who, from the planetary dress circle of the universe, are watching us through their opera glasses. It must be still queerer to them when they hear us chanting a Miserere at the approach of an invincible line across the face of Time, as imaginary as the Equator, and when it is passed, filling the air with a Jubilate—the songs of the dying and the coming year. It is rather a comfort to us that we don't believe in the dress circle of gazers ”

“ But it was in her great and realistic combat with dogs that I admired Maria most. Every day about noon two setter dogs would come lounging about the yard with the most innocent air in the world. It was Maria's lunch time and the little thing would toddle in and bring out her lunch. No sooner would she appear than the dogs would rush on her and roll her in the dirt. There was a brief scuffle, an agonizing scream, the dirt flew, the dogs rushed off, and Maria sat up in tears, dirt and hunger. The lunch was gone. ”

“ It seems to me that if it were not for that sensitive disc, the Conscience, which conveys to us the 'still small voice,' from a country far beyond the reach of our petty theories, the Silence that envelops this planet would be intolerable. It is unbroken even by the second great event of Life—Death. It must be a strange sight viewed from elsewhere—this terrestrial chicken coop of ours, so small that if each of its inhabitants were to touch hands they would make a ring around it, sailing through the unbroken silence of Space. ”

“ After this week is over, you will take down the big sign over the door, close the blinds, and stand watching with grieved heart while your castle fades into the air. There is nothing on earth, as you will see when you are old, that is not something like these castles in Spain, and but One Thing, that is not tainted with their evanescent life. ”

“ He had learned a bad habit, and for a man or a Bug who has learned a bad habit, I am not certain that death can come too soon. He died thinking he knew everything worth knowing, for I have no doubt that through the panes of my window and across my narrow street he thought he had seen the World. Just as we larger, but not wiser animals think that after gazing through our little theological panes, we have seen clear through Eternity, and into the mind of the Father. After all, my Moth was not worse off than the rest of us. ”

“ It is the awful day when his ears are washed and touseled about; when his eyes are punched out by the towelled but unsparing hand of a Christian mother; when his shoes are put back on him for a day, and when, with a neck encircled by a collar starched to maddening stiffness, and with a pocket handkerchief the consistency of pasteboard, he is sent to the place of punishment. ”

“ Why is it that as soon as the frost of age touches a man he commences to tone down his dress, and as soon as it touches a woman she commences to tone hers up with all the hot house appliances to imitate the spring time of life. ”

“ I wonder if all of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge in our own hearts where alone we can hear the voice of God, and where, at any hour or in any scene, we can find an instant answer to all our doubts. There is but one spot on the ocean that leads me to a sort of a fanciful realization of a future life. ”

“ Between slang and adjectives, it is hard to choose, both are so detestable from a woman's lips. The difference is that the adjective insidiously captures the refined mind, while slang only holds captive the coarse mind. In a plain and intended to be truthful statement of any occurrence, the injection of three or four adjectives will change the whole tenor of narration, and give it a vraisemblance of untruth which it is hard for the hearer's mind to erase. As a matter of fact, an adjective ought to be a thought, not a word. ”

“ With an impartial judgment, therefore, and not influenced by the approval or disapproval of this vast dress circle, in whose existence we have no faith, let us take up these imaginary lines for a moment. It is unquestionable that, whether for good or evil, they have descended to us by tradition and custom as a legacy. They are sufficiently real to be of practical use, and they are used. It is by them that we set a time—alas, that we should have the necessity of doing it—to discard some vice, some sin, some weakness. ”

“ The castle, little one, that you are now living in has over the front door in big letters CHRISTMAS, and from its window you see such lots of fun that you will never have, such lots of presents that you will never get, and such a lot of imagining that you will never see realized. ”

“ Who thinks of the stars in health? No one. We think of supper, of the theatre, of the band concert, of the church, of the lecture—but who thinks of the stars they are walking under. It is given to the sick to remember them, and in return they remember the sick. Whoever else fails us the Stars are there. ”

“ While I was away I learned a secret that is worth a good deal of money to any young man intending marriage, and that would have been without price to me if I had known it thirty years ago—before I knew the estimable woman, who, in company, insists that I am her better-half, and in private treats me as if I were hardly a sixteenth. ”

“ But the steady old Street on which I live gives up its dissipated idea early, turns off light after light, and soon the lonely sidewalks are without a passenger. The Street does one thing for the sick man you wouldn't expect; it arouses a spirit of rebellion that is astonishing. Resignation is a beautiful virtue, but it chiefly exists on side streets and out of town. The man who is sick on a main street and professes to be resigned is a hypocrite. ”

“ I remember when your father married your mother forty years ago, that she lived in a castle in Spain, and to her eyes your father was clad in shining armor and wore long plumes in his hat, and to those same eyes was a Hero of high degree. Why, even the old gentleman who is writing this to you, has lived in those castles, and as he looks back at them now with their bare walls and broken windows and tumbled down appearance generally, he often wonders how he came to build them. ”

“ It is a priceless power. Let us use it, not in fixing days for reformation, not in lamenting over promises of reforms broken, and fixing other days to come; but in living a newer life every day—As we can make no bargain nor compromise about the time and place where our life shall end, let us take the matter into our own hands and so live that it will matter little when or where the end comes. ”

“ Man cannot harm him nor Womankind disappoint him.
* * * * *
I have been sitting up by the bedside of a dying Adjective. It was not through pity that I sat there, but through hate. For I detest an Adjective. It is the father of lies, the author of affectation and the progenitor of all exaggeration. They should be remitted to limbo with all the other crudities of youth. I have listened to the point of exasperation, through an evening, to the absurd use of adjectives by young girls of education and with some claims to good taste. ”

“ Boyzy remarks that this is a heartless view of it. But I silence that estimable woman by the observation that philosophers do not take the heart into account; the heart is the field of young lovers, physicians' fees and patent medicines. This observation which she does not understand, and, I may admit to you I am not so clear about myself, convinces her that I am not only a philosopher, but a profound one. Ah! to a man of profound observation, how many better ways of securing the respect of the female sex there are than the primitive one of clubbing them. ”

“ The sea is fast being blown away. The sun comes out. The whole landscape is changed and the great billows of mist that have covered it are now thin strips of white cloud driven across the blue sky. Once more you see spread out at your feet the valley, checkered with farms and orchards, and dotted with farmhouses shining in the sun. ”