Josiah Royce

“ Night with pestilent breath Feeds us, children of death, Clothes us close with her gloom. Rapine and famine and fright Crouch at our feet and are fed. Earth where we pass is a tomb, Life where we triumph is dead. ”

“ Nay, is it night with you yet? We, for our part, we forget What night was, if it were. The loud red mouths of the fight Are silent and shut where we are. In our eyes the tempestuous air Shines as the face of a star. ”

“ It rains outside overhead Always, a rain that is red, And our faces are soiled with the rain. Here in the season’s despite Day-time and night-time are one, Till the curse of the kings and the chain Break, and their toils be undone. ”

“ All night through without sleep We weep, and we weep, and we weep. Who shall give us our sons? Beaks of raven and kite, Mouths of wolf and of hound, Give us them back whom the guns Shot for you dead on the ground. ”

“ I feel not the red rains fall, Hear not the tempest at all, Nor thunder in heaven any more. All the distance is white With the soundless feet of the sun. Night, with the woes that it wore, Night is over and done. ”

“ The night will last me my time. The gold on a crown or a crime Looks well enough yet by the lamps. Have we not fingers to write, Lips to swear at a need? Then, when danger decamps, Bury the word with the deed. ”

“ My native town was a mining town in the Sierra Nevada, — a place five or six years older than myself. My earliest recollections include a very frequent wonder as to what my elders meant when they said that this was a new community. I frequently looked at the vestiges left by the former diggings of miners, saw that many pine logs were rotten, and that a miner's grave was to be found in a lonely place not far from my own house. Plainly men had lived and died thereabouts. ”

“ The best concrete instance of the life of a community with which I have had the privilege to become well acquainted has been furnished to me by my own Seminary, one whose meetings you have so kindly and graciously permitted me to attend as leader, on this to me so precious occasion. ”

“ I stand by the verge of the sea, Banished, uncomforted, free, Hearing the noise of the waves And sudden flashes that smite Some man's tyrannous head, Thundering, heard among graves That hide the hosts of his dead. ”

“ I have been unpractical, — always socially ineffective as regards genuine “team play,” ignorant of politics, an ineffective member of committees, and a poor helper of concrete social enterprises. Meanwhile I have always been, as in my childhood, a good deal of a nonconformist, and disposed to a certain rebellion. An English cousin of mine not long since told me that, according to a family tradition current in his community, a common ancestor of ours was one of the guards who stood about the scaffold of Charles the First. ”

“ I long paid a great deal of attention to the philosophy of Kant. But during the years before 1890, I never supposed myself to be very strongly under the influence of Hegel, nor yet of Green, nor of either of the Cairds. I should confess to the charge of having been, during my German period of study, a good deal under the influence of the Romantic School, whose philosophy of poetry I read and expounded with a good deal of diligence. But I early cherished a strong interest in logic, and long desired to get a fair knowledge of mathematics. ”

“ My earliest teachers in philosophy were my mother, whose private school, held for some years in our own house, I attended, and my sisters, who were all older than myself, and one of whom taught me to read. In my home I heard the Bible very frequently read, and very greatly enjoyed my mother’s reading of Bible stories, although, so far as I remember, I was very generally dissatisfied with the requirements of observance of Sundays, which stand out somewhat prominently in my memory. Our home training in these respects was not, as I now think, at all excessively strict. ”

“ About June, 1866, 1 began to attend a large Grammar School in San Francisco. I was one of about a thousand boys. The ways of training were new to me. My comrades , very generally found me disagreeably striking in my appearance, by reason of the fact that I was redheaded, freckled, countrified, quaint, and unable to play boys’ games. The boys in question gave me my first introduction to the “majesty of the community.” ”