Page images
PDF
EPUB

A face which is always serene possesses a mysterious and powerful attraction: sad hearts come to it as to the sun to warm themselves again.

1440

Joseph Roux: Meditations of a Parish Priest. Love, Friendship, Friends, No. 10. (Hapgood, Translator.)

Faces are as legible as books, with this difference in their favor, that they may be perused in much less time than printed pages, and are less liable to be misunderstood.

1441 Frederick Saunders: Stray Leaves of Literature. Physiognomy.

A noble soul spreads even over a face in which the archi. tectonic beauty is wanting an irresistible grace, and often even triumphs over the natural disfavor.

1442 Schiller Essays, Esthetical and Philosophical. Grace and Dignity.

Now Heaven bless that sweet face of thine!

1443 Shakespeare: King Henry IV. Pt. ii. Act ii. Sc. 4. Doubtless the human face is the grandest of all mysteries; yet fixed on canvas it can hardly tell of more than one sensation; no struggle, no successive contrasts accessible to dramatic art, can painting give, as neither time nor motion exists for her.

1444

Madame de Staël: Corinne. Bk. viii. Ch. 4. (Isabel Hill, Translator.)

Sea of upturned faces.

1445

FACT.

Daniel Webster: Speech, Faneuil Hull, Boston,
Mass., Sept. 30, 1842. Reception to Mr
Webster.

Facts are stubborn things.

1446 Elliot Essays. Field Husbandry, 1747. Le Sage: Gil Blas. Bk. x. Ch. 1.

FAILURE - -see Virtue

(Smollett, Translator.)

There have, undoubtedly, been bad great men; but inasmuch as they were bad, they were not great.

1447 Leigh Hunt: Table Talk. Bad Great Men. Complaints are vain; we will try to do better another time. To-morrow and to-morrow. A few designs and a few failures, and the time of designing is past.

1448

Johnson: Letters to and from the late Samuel
Johnson. From Original MS. by Hester
Lynch Piozzi, London, 1788. I. 53. (George
Birkbeck Hill, Editor.)

To fail at all is to fail utterly.
1449

Lowell: Among My Books. Dryden.

The weakest goes to the wall.

1450

Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet.

Act i. Sc. 1.

Many men and women spend their lives in unsuccessful attempts to spin the flax God sends them upon a wheel they

can never use.

1450

FAITH

Timothy Titcomb (J. G. Holland): Gold-Foil.
I. An Exordial Essay.

• see Courage, Distrust, Experience, Hope, Prayer, Song.

Without faith a man can do nothing. But faith can stifle all science.

1452 Amiel: Journal, Feb. 7, 1872. (Mrs. Humphrey
Ward, Translator.)

Faith is nothing but spiritualized imagination.
1453 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth

Pulpit.

The highest order that was ever instituted on earth is the order of faith.

1454

Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth
Pulpit.

The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it.

1455 Phillips Brooks: Sermons. IV. Keeping the Faith. Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.

1456

William Ellery Channing: Note-Book. Faith. Faith needs her daily bread.

1457 Georgiana M. Craik: Fortune's Marriage. Ch. 10. Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms. 1458

Emerson: Miscellanies. Address, Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838.

Heaven alone, not earth, is destined to witness the repose of faith.

1459 Moses Harvey: Lectures on the Harmony of Science and Revelation.

Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the belief of large ones.

1460

Hoimes: The Professor at the Breakfast-
Table. Ch. 5.

This is faith: it is nothing more than obedience.

1461 Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary. Faith. Sec. 2. (Kneeland, Translator.)

A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear.

1462

George MacDonald: Sir Gibbie. Ch. 11

Faith is obedience, not compliance.

1463 George MacDonald: The Marquis of Lossie. Ch. 64, The principal part of faith is patience.

1464 George MacDonald: Weighed and Wanting. Ch. 53. Faith is among men what gravity is among planets and

suns.

1465 Charles H. Parkhurst: Sermons.

by Faith.

IV. Walking

Faith is mind at its best, its bravest, and its fiercest. Faith is thought become poetry, and absorbing into itself the soul's great passions. Faith is intellect carried up to its transfig

urement. 1466

Charles H. Parkhurst: Sermons. IV. Walking
by Faith.

Faith is the heroism of intellect.
1467 Charles H. Parkhurst: Sermons. IV. Walking
by Faith.

Faith is the very heroism and enterprise of intellect. Faith is not a passivity, but a faculty. Faith is power, the material of effect. Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants. 1468

Charles H. Parkhurst: Sermons. IV. Walking

by Faith.

Faith in a better than that which appears is no less required by art than by religion.

1469

John Sterling: Essays and Tales.
Thoughts and Images.

Faith is the force of life.
1470

Thoughts.

Tolstoi: My Confession. Ch. 11.

Faith is the root of works. A root that produceth nothing

is dead.

1471

Thomas Wilson: Maxims of Piety and of
Christianity.

Our life must answer for our faith.

[blocks in formation]

Cottages have them (falsehood and dissimulation) as well

as courts, only with worse manners.

1474

Lord Chesterfield: Letter to His Son,

April 15, 1748.

Falsehood is fire in stubble; it likewise turns all the light stuff around it into its own substance for a moment, one crackling blazing moment, and then dies; and all its converts are scattered in the wind, without place or evidence of their existence, as viewless as the wind which scatters them.

1475

Coleridge: Omniana. Truth and Falsehood. Falsehood is often rocked by truth; but she soon outgrows her cradle and discards her nurse.

1476

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.
1477

Colton: Lacon.

George Eliot: Adam Bede. Ch. 17. Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.

1478

Nothing gives such a

Hazlitt: Characteristics. No. 266. blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.

1479

Hazlitt: Characteristics.

No. 199.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying that there is so much falsehood in the world. 1480 Johnson: Boswell's Life of Johnson. III. 228. (George Birkbeck Hill, Editor, 1887.) Large offers and sturdy rejections are among the most common topics of falsehood.

1481 Johnson: Works. VII. 98. (Oxford edition, 1825.)
Falsehood is for a season.
1482 Landor: Imaginary Conversations. William Penn
and Lord Peterborough.

Dissembling profiteth nothing; a feigned countenance, and slightly forged externally, deceiveth but very few.

1483

Seneca: Works. Epistles, No. 79. (Thomas
Lodge, Editor.)

FAME-see Envy, Knowledge, Poetry, Success, Vice. Were not this desire of fame very strong, the difficulty of obtaining it, and the danger of losing it when obtained, would be sufficient to deter a man from so vain a pursuit.

1484 Addison: The Spectator. No. 255. Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property

of a man.

1485 Carlyle: Essays. Goethe. (Foreign Review, 1828.) Money will buy money's worth, but the thing men call fame, what is it?

1486

Carlyle Essays. Memoirs of the Life of Scott. (London and Westminster Review, Nos. XII. and LV., 1838.)

What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity: not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity, wherein dwelleth the Divine. 1487 Carlyle: Thomas Carlyle, First Forty Years, by Froude. Vol. ii. Ch. 14. Journal, Jan. 12, 1833.

Valor and power may gain a lasting memory, but where are they when the brave and mighty are departed? Their effects may remain, but they live not in them any more than the fire in the work of the potter.

1488 Hartley Coleridge: Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford. Introduction.

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.

1489

Colton: Lacon.

An earthly immortality belongs to a great and good character. History embalms it; it lives in its moral influence, in its authority, in its example, in the memory of the words and deeds in which it was manifested; and as every age adds to the illustrations of its efficacy, it may chance to be the best understood by a remote posterity.

1490 Edward Everett: Orations and Speeches.

Beverly, July 4, 1835.

Oration,

Fame is the echo of actions, resounding them to the world, save that the echo repeats only the last part; but fame relates all, and often more than all.

1491

Thomas Fuller: The Holy and Profane States.
The Holy State. Of Fame.

Fame sometimes hath created something of nothing.
1492
Thomas Fuller: The Holy and Profane States.
The Holy State. Of Fame.

Popular glory is a perfect coquette; her lovers must toil, feel every inquietude, indulge every caprice, and perhaps at last be jilted into the bargain. True glory, on the other hand, resembles a woman of sense; her admirers must play no tricks. They feel no great anxiety, for they are sure in the end of being rewarded in proportion to their merit. 1493 Goldsmith: The Bee. Many are the uses of good fame to a generous mind: it extends our existence and example into future ages; continues and propagates virtue, which otherwise would be as shortlived as our fame, and prevents the prevalence of vice in a generation more corrupt even than our own. It is impossible

No. 6.

« PreviousContinue »