Various

“ The pacer’s gait has itself been greatly improved in the last ten years. He is no longer the rotary-motioned mud-flinger of old, whose forefeet pawed the air in circles parallel with and above his ears, while his hind feet described semicircles over the ground, but he is now a smooth-gaited, straightforward, quick-actioned fellow, with plenty of knee action in front and the stride of a bullfrog behind, and at his highest speed it requires more than a glance for one to say whether he is trotting or pacing. ”

“ As civilization advanced he improved with it, being crossed with thoroughbred blood in rich profusion, until to-day his lines of breeding are thoroughly established, and by his speed, gameness and bottom he has advanced from the humble position of the family man-of-all-work to the fleet-footed king of the light-harness world—from the simple cabin in the clearing, and the gentle caress of the backwoodman’s family, to the applause of the grand stand. ”

“ After a day’s journey through the country a very observant and thoughtful man will be forced to acknowledge that a great many farmers do not seem to think. The amount of high-priced machinery allowed to rust and ruin in the fields, the haphazard way in which grain and hay is stacked, the utter indifference displayed in plowing land and laying off rows, the disregard that is paid to the washing away of the soil, soil that was thousands of years in forming, the fertility of which depends upon the actions of the elements for generations; a soil that, when once gone, is gone forever. ”

“ To attempt to define the poetic principle would be like attempting to sound the depths of our immortal souls, the very spirit of eternal life, a depth as varied as humanity—in some, as deep as the valleys in the ocean’s bed, in other “ending in shallows and in miseries.” I believe it was Mendelssohn who said there were two things mortal man should not attempt to define—“God Almighty and Thorough-Base-and-Harmony.”
Poetry is the music of the intellect and, therefore, like the musical principle, is indefinable. ”

“ Wherever there lies the wounded and helpless by the wayside of life, wheresoe’er in the world there shall spring to the rescue some strong son of God armed to the teeth with wine and oil for the wound and the sword of the Lord and of Gideon for the assassin, our right worshipful dollar shall change its meaning and its face—its eagle shall have the olive branch in its mouth. ”

“ It is quite plain that no definition can be given of poetry that would apply to all poetry or even to the poetic principle. No more than can be given a definition of love, or the sweet character of the Christ, or of God, or of eternity. Each true poem, like the keys of a piano, may awake a different chord, and every one perfect. ”

“ Farming to-day is a scientific problem, and a problem that requires all the thought that can be bestowed upon it. Not a thought for to-day or to-morrow, but long-headed thought that studies the supply and demand of the year ahead before planting largely of any one crop or launching into any new enterprise. He must study the supply and price before he can tell whether to hold wheat or longer feed his cattle; must know the needs and study the rotation to get the best results from each crop; must think to be able to properly harvest and care for each crop as it matures ”

“ For when a gully is stopped with manure, it is only a question of time before it will have to be stopped again, and the next time the task will be greater, for there will not be much adjoining soil with which to stop it.
When we see a farmer delving with his whole household from daybreak till dark, denying his children the privilege of a common school education, trusting to luck and brawn to carry them through life, we have another illustration of a farmer who does not think. ”

“ Man is a killing animal by instinct, and a hog by nature, and neither poetry nor romance nor the wild glory of the great fields can stop him from killing when his killing blood is up and his stomach is at stake. ”

“ There is no subject which is of more vital interest to the South and to the whole world than successful cotton culture. In spite of the repeated claims to the contrary, in which every now and then it is predicted that certain areas in Africa, India, China and South America will be devoted to cotton, the fact remains that that strip of country lying on the map of the Southern part of the United States is the finest cotton belt in the world, and so far absolutely the only large body of land that has ever produced year in and out any very great amount of the fleece. ”

“ Everywhere before your very eyes is it unfolding—unfolding an asylum for the helpless, hospitals for the sick, charitable institutions of every type are reaching out their arms all over the world for earth’s stricken ones—its motherless and helpless. You pessimists do not believe in humanity, nor do I, but I believe in humanity’s Christ, and I know He is breathing into His own utterance the law that is to redeem the whole earth. ”

“ First of all, real poetry is true, and absolutely a part of our souls, our experience, ourselves, our most positive beliefs. At first it may not be readily understood by us—a fact in itself which should warn us not to be too hasty in condemning it, because that very fact may show it has touched on a higher, not a lower plane than the plane we are on, and that we must climb to it, not drag it down to us. Such is the poetry of Keats, Tennyson, Shelley and Browning. ”

“ How else could the fact that every great family of trotters is continually throwing pacers be explained by any other theory? The fact that the trotting breeders have been careless in breeding to mares of strong pacing instinct or breeding, we admit; but the fact remains the same that the pacing blood in the pedigree of such trotters does not appear to have acted as a brake in their way of going, but, on the contrary, has given to them a smoothness of action and an elasticity of stride which has carried them to the foremost rank at their gait ”

“ In these, as in all true poetry, though all of it may not be fully grasped at first, there is an indefinable something that touches us and makes us wish to read it again and again until, having tuned our own souls to the key of its beauty we stand elevated, instructed, sweetened, strengthened, blessed! ”

“ Stories of the Soil The Little Things of Life, Happening All Over the World and Caught in Ink for Trotwood’s Monthly.
War Babies. The most gigantic struggle of modern times was the American Civil War. In no other country but this, with its breadth of conservativeness and its dearth of caste, could the bitterness of such a war have been so quickly forgotten. As it is in a few more decades, if the same spirit of good feeling continues to prevail, and the fanatics be allowed to die a natural death, it will be a question as to which side will have the most respect for the brave men of the other. ”

“ In other words, the pacer has come to be a well-rounded, symmetrical and well-bred horse. His gait is the poetry of harness motion, his courage is unquestioned and his staying qualities, especially with the pacing-bred ones, of whom we are more familiar, are equal to those of any horse that ever stretched his neck in the home stretch. In view of these facts it doesn’t require even the grandson of a prophet to predict he is destined to a still greater career on the light harness race course. ”

“ How amusing the efforts of a Tennessee statesman in a recent great occasion, majestically sweeping the heavens with his hands and solemnly proclaiming that “Tennessee had set more stars in the galaxy of glory than all the other States.” Bosh! Tennessee [114] has as many fools to the acre as any other State, and what she should do just now is to set more hens and fewer stars!
People who live with nature soon learn a great deal. The best way to study nature is to get in harmony with the laws of nature. ”

“ To our mind, we believe that if the curtain of the past could ever be unrolled upon the pacers of old we would find that centuries ago he was bred for no other way of going, and bred so long and so purely and so consistently that in him has been planted an instinct that will never be obliterated. To argue that a cold-blooded horse can be thus preponent is to argue against the well-known laws of heredity! ”

“ Recipes, indeed, are a test of one’s civilization—one’s religion—one’s mentality. They are the products of the centuries beginning with the primitive clam and ending with the thousand glories of the oyster. ”

“ In fact, more of it—much more—appears there than in magazines, being often the bursting of a wild rose in the meadow into full bloom and giving its perfume to the world without pay and without knowledge of its own sweetness. ”

“ I was thinking of one of her facts the other day—she has so many thousands—but I noticed it is a fact that the man who works the soil is a natural-born optimist. Let the farmer fail year after year and he still plants, hoping. Let the merchant fail one year and he is badly shaken—one more—another, maybe—and he is done. That is the Fact. Now for the rule: God intended man to love, to cultivate, to cling to the soil. ”

“ Each one, with speed, is simply a money-making machine, and his owner will not be long in putting him at the work which nature cut out for him. To destroy him merely because he paces belongs to the dark ages when the pacing gait was one which made no money, but now, since the pacing purses have gotten to be so liberal and getting more so each year, it is only common sense to suppose that owners of pacing horses will begin to take more pains in their development and their breeding. ”

“ Let us not judge poetry, then, by the two false extremes in which we meet it most often—newspapers and magazines—and the two which have caused so many to form unfavorable opinions of poetry. Forgetting that rhyme is not poetry, and that a poem is the product of life, the newspaper poet tries to jingle one out every day. ”

“ Shintoism knows no Sunday, no soul, no to-morrow, no eternity. Shintoism is blind chance pitched against the barb-wire of blind unbelief.
It is time to see clearly—to turn. We have conquered our own kin with a soulless, smiling, ghost-born being who is far-sighted and will yet make our children wonder why we gave him a Mauser for posterity. ”

“ Pioneer days in Texas, and the prairies unbroken by the smoke of a single cabin. To the south the Brazos, and to the west the buffalo lands, the herds crawling in the distance, like huge mud-waves on land, toward their fall feeding grounds.
There had been raids by the Comanches, then hot fighting with the troops and every settler west of the Brazos had run into the fort, each with his family, his man-servant and maid-servant, each [92] with his cattle and his asses. For the Comanches are wily devils and born horsemen. One day they are here, and the next they are not. ”

“ Nearly every man in our regiment went in on his pet saddle mare or half thoroughbred, and fully two-thirds of us were horse breeders, on a greater or less scale, while at home. But the war went on, we were ordered here and there, hundreds of miles from home with plenty of fighting and little else to think of. We were kept so busy that many of us, in fact, had forgotten all about the spring breeding, and would have been glad if it had forgotten about itself. ”

“ If he is a scrub, then he is the veritable ‘original sire’ of the scrub horse business, which, like that in man, is ever on top. But as this sin of the pacer helps him to the wire first, and has given him the harness records of the world, we trust no trotting moralist will attempt to entirely obliterate it. ”

“ Every citizen of this great republic should travel over his own country. He will be amazed at its greatness, and his prejudices and local conceits, if he have any breadth at all, will grow fewer the further he goes, and learns that the world cares nothing for the petty environments and embroilments of his own bailiwick. ”

“ Study the poverty of their pedigrees, for it takes poverty to make a pedigree.
The first immigrants to our shores came solely for gold, it is said. What kind of a republic would we have to-day if they had landed on the Pacific slope of gold instead of the Atlantic slope of rocks?
And yet, America is run over with people to-day who think that gold is everything. They think it so hard that the land is filled with trusts and steals and the things which breed greed and guilt. ”

“ In Tennessee and Kentucky he has always been a great favorite, and since the race-track act has been added to his many other accomplishments he is destined to be yet more popular. But the student who attempts to trace his development is lost in a maze of thoroughbred blood and ‘native stock.’ That the ‘pacing-bred pacer’ of to-day is simply a mixture of the old ambling pacer of Europe, whatever he was, and thoroughbred there is no doubt in the world. ”

“ How sayest thou, I have loved my neighbor as myself, when thou hast stopped thine ears and shut thine eyes and stalked on by all those who are lying by the wayside of the Kingdom, dying through all these years of your history and theirs? ”

“ It will make this poor, weary, burdened earth to blossom as the rose; shall make all our desert like the garden of the Lord. It shall become the universal solvent for all problems arising from man’s relation to man. It will stop every war before noon to-morrow.
Then shall the lion of capital and the lamb of labor lie down together, and neither shall be afraid, neither shall there be any more strikes, nor walking delegates ”

“ I fast twice in the week. My life is clean in the sight of the law—“Thank God, I am not as other men are”—as that disciple of yours there, for instance. What further shall I do or can I do to inherit eternal life? What lack I yet or the existing church of God? In so far as you are teaching anything new it must be false, and anything old is it not unnecessary? ”

“ For every poet is also a preacher, and the greatest of all preachers. And if it fails to perform its mission, if it does not sound its chord, and that clearly, but a mere jingling of pretty bells, it is no more a poem than a dancing harem girl, with silver bells, bracelets and anklets on her, is a woman. Every poem that has ever lived lived because it filled a mission ”