C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Beattie

Ah! who can tell how hard it is to climb

The steep where Fame’s proud temple shines afar?

And from the prayer of Want, and plaint of Woe,

O never, never turn away thine ear!

Forlorn, in this bleak wilderness below,

Ah! what were man, should Heaven refuse to hear!

And none speaks false, when there is none to hear.

And, lo! in the dark east, expanded high,

The rainbow brightens to the setting Sun.

Borne on the swift, tho’ silent wings of time,

Old age comes on apace, to ravage all the clime.

Dreadful is their doom, whom doubt has driven

To censure fate, and pious hope forego.

Is there a heart that music cannot melt?

Alas! how is that rugged heart forlorn.

Let those deplore their doom,

Whose hope still grovels in this dark sojourn;

But lofty souls, who look beyond the tomb,

Can smile at Fate, and wonder how they mourn.

Mine be the breezy hill that skirts the down;

Where a green grassy turf is all I crave,

With here and there a violet bestrown,

Fast by a brook or fountain’s murmuring wave;

And many an evening sun shine sweetly on my grave!

No jealousy their dawn of love o’ercast,

Nor blasted were their wedded days with strife;

Each season look’d delightful as it past,

To the fond husband, and the faithful wife.

Thy shades, thy silence, now be mine,

Thy charms my only theme;

My haunt the hollow cliff, whose pine

Waves o’er the gloomy stream.

Where the sacred owl, on pinions gray,

Breaks from the rustling boughs,

And down the lone vale sails away,

To more profound repose.

’Twas thus by the glare of false science betray’d,

That leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind.

True dignity is his whose tranquil mind

Virtue has raised above the things below;

Who, every hope and fear to heaven resign’d

Shrinks not, though fortune aims her deadliest blow.

What cannot art and industry perform,

When science plans the progress of their toil!

Be ignorance thy choice where knowledge leads to woe.

But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn? O, when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?

Common sense is nature’s gift, but reason is an art.

Contentment opes the source of every joy.

From labor health, from health contentment springs.

He thought as a sage, though he felt as a man.

In all instances where our experience of the past has been extensive and uniform, our judgment concerning the future amounts to moral certainty.

Is there a heart that music cannot melt?

Let us cherish sympathy. By attention and exercise it may be improved in every man. It prepares the mind for receiving the impressions of virtue; and without it there can be no true politeness. Nothing is more odious than that insensibility which wraps a man up in himself and his own concerns, and prevents his being moved with either the joys or the sorrows of another.

Perish the lore that deadens young desire!

Silent when glad; affectionate, though shy.

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think than what to think,—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.

The love of God ought continually to predominate in the mind, and give to every act of duty grace and animation.

There is not a book on earth so favorable to all the kind and to all the sublime affections, or so unfriendly to hatred and persecution, to tyranny, injustice, and every sort of malevolence, as the Gospel.

They who, by speech or writing, present to the ear or eye of modesty any of the indecencies, are pests of society.

To think everything disputable is a proof of a weak mind and a captious temper.

True dignity is his whose tranquil mind virtue has raised above the things below.

Zealous, yet modest.

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