Lowliness

“ God works with broken reeds, and the princes in His realm are beggars taken from the dunghill. A lowliness which made itself lowly for the sake of eminence would miss its aim, for it would not be lowliness. The desire to be foremost must be cast out, in order that it may be fulfilled. ”

“ Lowliness is the secret of spiritual roominess. It is only the humble man who has any room for the Lord. All the chambers in the proud man’s soul are thronged with self-conceits, and God is crowded out. Our Lord always finds ample room for Himself wherever the heart bows in humility and says: “I am not worthy that Thou shouldst come under my roof.” ”

“ The mind, thus disappointed, preys upon itself, and compares its present lowliness with the imaginary heights for which it fancies itself to have been intended. Under the influence of these reflections, the character grows sullen and reserved, detaches itself from all social enjoyments, and professes to despise the honours for which it secretly pines. ”

“ And evidence of wise men witnessing;
No leaf that is so soft a hidden thing
It never shall get sight of the great sun;
The strength of ten has been the strength of one,
And lowliness has waxed imperious. ”

“ Think of a man, nineteen centuries ago, away in a little insignificant corner of the world, standing up and saying, 'My death is the price paid in exchange for the world!' That is meekness and lowliness of heart, is it? That is humility, so beautiful in a teacher, is it? ”

“ Who shall tell us that outward nature has no effect upon our mood? All around seemed to frown upon my lot. I read in the face of heaven and earth a confirmation of the curse which man hath set upon poverty. I leant against a tree that overhung the waters, and suffered my thoughts to glide on in the bitter silence of their course. I heard my name uttered—I felt a hand on my arm, I turned, and Houseman was by my side. ”

“ I wander far From Thee among the haunts of men, Most like some lone, faint, flickering star Gone from its place, nor knoweth when The sun shall give it shining dole Lord! no man careth for my soul. Blind, Lord, so blind! In loneliness By crowded mart or busy street, I fold my hands and feel how less Am I to any one I meet, Than to Thee one lost billow’s roll: Lord! no man careth for my soul. ”

“ Imagine—unhappily you need exercise no great stretch of the faculty, the papers teem with too many instances—imagine a poor, woe-begone, miserable creature, destitute and friendless, without a home, without a meal; his tattered clothing displaying through every rent the shrunken form and wasted limbs to which hunger and want have reduced him. See him as night falls, plodding onwards through the crowded thoroughfares of the great city; his lack-lustre eye glazed and filmy; his pale face and blue lip actually corpse-like in their ghastliness. ”

“ What abundance, under pretence of cleanliness and neatness, is spent in needless curiosity about rooms, and furniture, and accommodations, and matters of mere pride, vain-glory, and ostentation, covered with the honest name of decency! What abundance is wasted in entertainments, and unnecessary visits, compliments, ceremony, and servitude to the humours of men of vanity! ”

“ Poverty and hypocrisy rubbed shoulders with ostentation, greed, and lust. Streets, crowded with a suffocating similarity of stodgy dwelling-places, gave way to parks, fragrant with the atmosphere of romance. ”

“ Let us pass then to a different scene, and seek some abode of poverty. We are, perhaps, afraid to enter, so repulsive, or unpleasing is all that meets the eye. In that rude home, which every wind of heaven can penetrate, we find a dying one. ”

“ As autumn approached, with faint notice on his part, his anger and resentment retreated, leaving in their wake a gentle stir of regret and remorse. Imperceptibly, he grew physically weary; a strange sensation of loneliness and isolation enveloped him. A species of timidity came upon him; he felt an unhappy remoteness from people, and began to edge away from life. ”

“ Nothing that is abstractedly mental, is low. The mind that well describes low scenery is not low, nor is the description itself necessarily so. Pride, and contempt for our fellow-creatures, evince a low tone of moral feeling, and is the innate vulgarity of the soul ”

“ Every one who recalls the familiar picture knows what a dreary, hopeless scene it is—the room stamped with poverty, the window stark and curtainless, the woman meagerly clad, the man bearing the marks of hardship. ”

“ And he said, "You are far too selfish To dwell in a human form, To have both food and shelter, And fire to keep you warm. "Now, you shall build as the birds do, And shall get your scanty food By boring, and boring, and boring, All day in the hard, dry wood." ”

“ See, yonder, where the lazy smoke rises heavily from the mountain side, high up there amid the fern and the tall heath, that is a human dwelling,—there lives some cottier a life of poverty as uncheered and unpitied as though he made no part of the great family of man. ”

“ Others, lying on their backs with mouths agape, snored loudly as if still venting the plaint of their sorry life. And others tossed restlessly, still struggling in their slumber against fatigue and cold and hunger, which pursued them like nightmares of monstrous shape. ”

“ After living alone with you in solitude, when you showed me all your thoughts without reserve,—little by little, somehow the fancy passed off. I caught the ROSMER view of life badly, and dulness descended on my soul as an extinguisher upon one of our Northern dips. The ROSMER view of life is ennobling, very—but hardly lively. ”

“ I find the dwellings dark, the dresses ugly, the sky sorrowful. How oddly you dress for such a climate. I find that life in general is more stupid, and that human beings look much less happy than in the older and more golden days. ”

“ Horrid, frowning waste and aimless discontinuity of land, harbinger of loneliness and of evil! People, poor struggling beings of our kind, here seemed mocked of destiny, and a hot raging of misery waged within them, for all that the heart might desire and wish for had to them been denied. ”

“ Go where you will, the rocks will retain no impress of your footsteps; dwell where you please, the mountains are your only witnesses, and they gaze with equal indifference on your presence and on your absence. But the fitfulness of human habitation among them, the absence of any effort to civilize them, to make them shelter man and minister to his wants, gives them an air of stubborn hopeless sterility, [88] very imposing, very repelling. Gradually the loneliness will strike into your heart with a feeling almost akin to horror. ”

“ Because poverty grinds and hosts of menial duties accumulate, because the walls of an unquiet home, made unlovely perhaps by skeletons that no skill can quite conceal, close like a dungeon upon hope and all the sweet promises of youth, bright natures grow morose and bitter, warm hearts chill into apathy and gloom, and sunny brows darken under the cloud of almost perpetual irritability and discontent. ”

“ I have watched these desperate men on their rounds looking for work. They are poverty stricken in appearance; their expression is one of utter hopelessness. They look like men who are going downhill, men who have reached the period of diminishing returns, and they feel exactly as they look. Their appearance is the reflex of their thought. Their dress, their manner, their gait, the look in their eyes, everything about them corresponds to their mental attitude, and all point downgrade. ”

“ The mere fact of your having breathed an atmosphere in common with him has robbed you of those social excellences for which you were all so remarkable; you have become vain, tetchy, jealous, and morose. ”

“ Bodiless, homeless, breathing forth its plaint,
Nor yet from life and its sad memories fled.
Soh! it comes swooning through the air so taint
Acute and clear as ever arrow sped;
Ah! miserere for the hapless soul,
That from the shores of death thus wafts its dole. ”

“ Foremost scampers a rabble of boys, behind whom moves a dense and dark phalanx of grown men, and lastly a crowd of females with young children and a few scattered husbands. This instantaneous outbreak of life into loneliness is one of the pleasantest scenes of the day. ”

“ But go down to that miserable lane, where men mothered by Misery and sired by Crime, where the sons of Poverty and the daughters of Wretchedness, are huddled thick together, and you see this Demon of Intemperance in all his ugliness. ”

“ Their present grim, dingy, almost squalid exteriors, are strongly suggestive to the mind of a stranger of internal poverty, desolation and dirt, than which nothing can be more distant from their real in-door condition ”

“ The low and the base, the palled taste of luxury, the satiated sense of licentiousness, the callous heart of selfishness, the blunted sensibilities of lust, covetousness, gluttony, effeminacy, and idleness, take refuge in indifference, and call it to their aid, lest vanity—the weakest, but the last point to become hardened in the heart of man—should be wounded. ”

“ I never saw such sickly, shabby, run-down-at-the-heels, decayed figures in all my life—figures from which all sap and juice and the freshness of youth and even manhood had long since departed. Men and women they were who seemed to emerge out of gutters and cellars where could be neither light nor freshness nor any sense of hope or care, but only eloquent misery. ”

“ These worthy and unworthy denizens of poverty-stricken dwellings, for in the assemblage there were both honest and dishonest, like most of their rank in society, were firm believers in the theory that fine clothes and a high-bred manner were reliable indications of a cowardly spirit and physical weakness. ”

“ The dependant who cultivates delicacy in himself, very little consults his own tranquillity. My unhappy vigilance is every moment discovering some petulance of accent, or arrogance of mien, some vehemence of interrogation, or quickness of reply, that recals my poverty to my mind, and which I feel more acutely, as I know not how to resent it. ”

“ When these gentry hold forth, by the hour, about their convictions and their theories, their beliefs and disbeliefs, their likings and dislikings, their tastes and their principles, their souls, their minds, and their bodies—if, in despair, you at last, by way of a change, turn the conversation towards some one else, they become loftily silent. ”

“ Even the pale faces of those who were able to keep on their feet and had found a place to stand in that swaying shelf of misery, were marked by a hopeless, brooding expression of anguish and bitterness. ”

“ When alone she seemed preoccupied and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary of speech and gesture—not from caution, but poverty of disposition; a man like a ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting ”

“ All the world was void and vapid, east and west alike indifferent, to one so homeless, and thus I stalked on through glades and coppices for hours and days, with my chin upon my chest, and feeling marvelously cheap and lonely. But enough of this. Never yet did I crave sympathy of any man: why should I seem to seek it of you—skeptical and remote? ”

“ And she thought that she had run down to the bottom of living, lain on that hard floor where the poor lie, known what it was to live as the poor live, in a hole, without generosity, beauty, or privacy—in a hole, dirty and cold, plain and coarse. ”

“ Yet I feel rarely rarefied, heavily rarefied, wornly rarefied in this living-place where Loneliness burns me in strong fire and where I can shake my life like a hollow gourd and hear the eerie rattling sound I make in it. ”

“ Even the repulsiveness of this outcast made his loneliness seem more terrible and tragic. What must life mean to such a creature as this? And perhaps he thanked God for his own youth, for his own clean brown skin, and for the right to look unabashed into the eyes of a man or a maid. ”

“ That, in fine, when the majority turn their faces this way, first keeping the houses of their souls swept and garnished for the love they are awaiting, then will the mountain of our misery be levelled, our valleys of despair filled up, and the rough places of life made plain? ”

“ Who, but they who have felt it, can imagine the sense of loneliness and desolation which must be the portion of those who in the hour of dangerous illness are left to be tended by strangers; for what hands, be they ever so gentle, can wipe the clammy brow, or smooth the restless bed, like those of mother, wife, or child? ”

“ But may come after it a wilder Loneliness of being free, fearfully free: flavored with the heaviness of rain at night and draggledness of beggar-women’s skirts.—
Meanwhile bright and black among Doors and Door-knobs and Curtains and Tables burns the fire of this Loneliness with strong, strong flame. It is mystic agony. There is no thinking in it. There is an utterly irrational wish, an aching yearning for people: not people to see, or listen to, or talk to, but—humanness I could feel with familiarity. ”

“ Whenever we look up there and think of you poor fellows shut up in that isolated spot we pity you immensely and wonder how you can bear the dreadful loneliness of it. Down here we are so much better off. ”

“ Or, urged by some swift hunger for green boughs, Would bid the hound to heel, and disappear Into the forest, with himself communing For lack of gossip. So do lonely men Make themselves tedious to their tedious selves. ”

“ They were the disappointed men of every station, from the highest to the lowest. The ruined gentleman, the beggared noble, the bankrupt trader, the houseless artisan, the homeless vagabond, were all there; bold, daring, and energetic, fearless as to the present, reckless as to the future. ”

“ For every neighborhood of taste and comfort, witness the vast areas of poverty, poor taste, neglect, dull thought, inefficiency. For every comfortable man a lean one, or many. For every mind of the first order a million of a weaker, fumbling character. ”