Mark Hopkins born 1802.
W. Harrison Ainsworth born 1805.
Jean Richepin born 1849.
Thomas Carlyle died 1881.
Life is not a May-game, but a battle and a march, a warfare with
principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange
groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by coral muses, and the
rosy hours; it is a stern pilgrimage through the rough, burning,
sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice.
--Thomas Carlyle.
For all sweet and pleasant passages in the great story of life men
may well thank God; for leisure and ease and health and friendship
may God make us truly and humbly grateful; but our chief song of
thanksgiving must be always for our kinship with him, with all that
such divinity of greatness brings of peril, hardship, toil, and
sacrifice.
--Hamilton Mabie.
Thy bars shall be iron and brass;
And as thy days, so shall thy strength be.
--Deuteronomy 33. 25.
My Father, help me to choose the road that leads to my work, and may I
not fail to reach it, by wandering away from it. Keep me in touch with
the human side of life, holding in mind that "Truth and honesty are
the noblest works of God." Amen.