O not keep the alabaster box of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them, and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier. The kind things you mean to say when they are gone, say before they go. The flowers you mean to send for their coffin, send to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them. Let us learn to anoint our friends while they are yet among the living. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the burdened heart; flowers on the coffin cast no fragrance backward over the weary way. -George W. Childs. Y BUSINESS is not to remake myself, -Robert Browning. E just shake hands at meeting We nod the head in greeting To many that go by But welcome through the gateway Old friends, There's open house for you! -Gerald Massey. THE HUMAN TOUCH IGH thoughts and noble in all lands Warm, vital, close, life's symbols dear,- -Richard Burton. IF THAT WERE ENOUGH O thrill with the joy of girded men, To go on forever and fail and go on again, To be mauled to the earth and arise, And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen with the eyes: With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night, That somehow the right is the right And the smooth shall bloom from the rough: Lord, if that were enough! -Robert Louis Stevenson. FIND earth not gray but rosy, Do I stoop? I pluck a posy. Do I stand and stare? All's blue. -Robert Browning. NE who claims that he knows about it Tells me the earth is a vale of sin; But I and the bees, and the birds, we doubt it, -Ella Wheeler Wilcox. HE inner side of every cloud is bright and shining; And always wear them inside out To show the lining. G --Ellen Thorncroft Fowler OD help me speak the little word T'S the song ye sing, and the smiles ye wear, -James Whitcomb Riley. THE GIST OF LIFE TO be up and doing, O In all the uproar and the press With voiceless calls, the ancient earth -Robert Louis Stevenson. HAT we call Luck Is simply Pluck, And doing things over and over; Courage and will, Perseverance and skill, Are the four leaves of Luck's clover. PIN cheerfully, Not tearfully, Though wearily you plod. Spin carefully, Spin prayerfully, But leave the thread with God. F YOU have knowledge, let others light their candles by it. -Thomas Fuller. HE people who always live in houses, and sleep on beds, and walk on pavements, and buy their food from butchers and bakers and grocers, are not the most blessed inhabitants of this wide and various earth. The circumstances of their existence are too mathematical and secure for perfect contentment. They live at second or third hand. They are boarders in the world. Everything is done for them by somebody else. -Henry van Dyke. N THE school of life many branches of knowledge are taught. But the only philosophy that amounts to anything after all, is just the secret of making friends with our luck. -Henry van Dyke. OUR KIND OF A MAN HE kind of a man for you and me! And loves where most is the need of love; -James Whitcomb Riley. |