I love thy skies, thy sunny mists,
Thy fields, thy mountains hoar,
Thy wind that bloweth where it lists;
Thy will, I love it more.
I love thy hidden truth to seek
All round, in sea, on shore;
The arts whereby like gods we speak;
Thy will to me is more.
I love thy men and women, Lord,
The children round thy door,
Calm thoughts that inward strength afford;
Thy will, O Lord, is more.
But when thy will my life shall hold,
Thine to the very core,
The world which that same will did mold
I shall love ten times more.
--George Macdonald.
No child of man may perish ere his time arrives;
A thousand arrows pierce him and he still survives;
But when the moment fixed in heaven's eternal will
Comes round, a single blade of yielding grass may kill.
--From the Mahabharata, tr. by Frederic Rowland Marvin.
God gives to man the power to strike or miss you;
It is not thy foe who did the thing.
The arrow from the bow may seem to issue,
But we know an archer drew the string.
--Saadi, tr. by James Freeman Clarke.
On two days it steads not to run from thy grave:
The appointed and the unappointed day;
On the first neither balm nor physician can save,
Nor thee on the second the universe slay.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson.