Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 December 1892 — SUBJECTS OF THOUGHT. [ARTICLE]

SUBJECTS OF THOUGHT.

The truly valiant dare everything but doing any other body an injury. Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character. The hardest trial of the heart is whether it can bear a rival’s failure without triumph. There is a paradox in pride; it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so. When moral courage feels that it is in the right there is no personal daring of which it is incapable. Honor hath three things in it: The vantage to do good; the approach to kings and principal persons, and the raising of a man’s own fortunes. A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them. There are many women who have never intrigued, and many men who have never gamed; but those who have done either but once are very extraordinary animals. Monuments may be builded to express the affection or pride of friends, or to display their wealth, but they are only valuable for the characters which they perpetuate. In a man’s hands, silence is the most terrible of all protests to the woman who loves him. Violence she can endure. Words she is always ready to meet with words on her side. But silence conquers her. If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it. Toil is the law. Pleasure comes through toll, and not by self-indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work his life is a happy one. There is no labor so productive as that which we give to an object for its own sake. The more we forget ourselves in our doings the greater the returns they will yield. The more we are willing to lose our life in our pursuits the more surely we shall And it in the fruit of our work. If a man finds that he is everywhere esteemed, considered honorable' and trustworthy, he will be stimulated to become still more so. If he finds every one suspecting him, he will much more easily succumb to temptation. And so with all other merits and demerits, showing how powerful a factor in human life is the emphasis we use. We touch one another in all life's associations; we impress more or less all with whom we come in contact. In the home, in society, in business, we leave our mark. It becomes us all then to inquire what kind of an impression we are making upon childhood and manhood in our several spheres of influence. Is it for good or for ill? If for good, then our life is worth living; if for evil, then it is a failure.

Never be Influenced by external appearances in forming your judgment of.a person. This is an important rule, for many a noble spirit is covered by habiliments of poverty, while not infrequently a showy exterior conceals a villain of the basest kind. Dean Swift said that nature had given every man a capacity of being agreeable, though not shining in company; and “there are a hundred men sufficiently qualified for both who by a very few faults that they ca# cotrect in half an hour are so much as tolerable. We must never forget that, whatever be the circumference which claims our allegiance, we are still the center, and must remain self-poised and resolute. He who despises himself, who neglects himself, who timidly conforms himself in all things to other people and has no respect for his own individuality, can never be a force in the world. This indeed is only another form of selfishness — loving ease and hating toil, living without energy or purpose, and sinking like a dead weight on whoever will bear it. It is perhaps difficult at once to preserve our centrality and to identify ourselves with each circumference; but what is there of the highest and the best that does not present difficulty? Emerson says, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but - the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”