Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 May 1883 — Odd Thoughts. [ARTICLE]

Odd Thoughts.

Sterne wrote: “Were lin a condition to stipulate with death, I should certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends, and therefore I never seriously think upon the mode and manner of this great catastrophe, but I constantly draw the curtain across it with this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order it that it happen not to me in my house, but rather in some decent inn. ” Otway said: “In all other uneasy chances of a man’s life, there’s an immediate recourse to some kind of succor; in want we apply to our friends, in sickness to physicians; but love, the sum total of all misfortunes, must be endured in silence; no friend so dear to trust with such a secret, nor remedy in art so powerful to remove its anguish. ” Samuel Johnson wrote; “In a man’s letters his soul is naked—whatever passes within him is there shown undisguised; nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, but to make a letter without affection, without wisdom, without gayety, without news, and without a secret is, doubtless, the great epistolic art.”