Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 October 1885 — CLEVELANDIANA. [ARTICLE]

CLEVELANDIANA.

Sentences Gathered at Random from Miss Cleveland's New Hook. We are liable to have notions until we get knowledge. Let career as means only to the end—character. The’ quality of divination is the intellectual element of altruistic faith. The noble soul would choose rather not to be than to be somebody in particular. ’ * So fine an irony has history that that which makes the shame of its wives makes the glory of its kings. One who has faith in thq concrete is sure to have it in the abstract; and the effect is that of optimism in the world. We can do no bravery or better thing than to bring our best thoughts to the evgry-day market. They will yield us usurious interest. ‘ -j? Milton’s sublime audacity of faith aerates the ponderous craft of his verse, and keeps it from sinking into the abyss of theological pedantry. The dullest mortal spirit must at times grope restlessly and expectantly in the outer darkness for something beyond, and this something must exist, will exist, in a true poem.

The mother makes the man, perhaps; but the wife manufactures him. Sometimes the wife, in her manufacture, confirms the making of the mother, sometimes counteracts it. The born poet has no agony in the deliverance of his song. The uttering is to him that soothing balm which the utterance is to the reader. It is weeping, not the tear wept, that gives relief. Reciprocity, constant and equal, among all His creatures, is the plan of the only Maker of plans, whose plans never fail in the least jot or tittle. He has reserved to Himself the power to give without receiving. Human history is nothing but one ceaseless flow of cause into effect, and of effect into cause. There is nothing but which is consequent. You and I are but the consequents of a vast tangle of antecedents in all time before.

What’s in a name ? A rose by any other name might swell as sweet; but a lily, if rechristened rose, would never diffuse the rose’s odor, nor gain, in addition to its own spotless perfections, the deep-hearted sorcery of that enchanting, crumpled wonder, which we thrill in touching, as if it, too, had nerves, and blood, and a human heart —arose. ■ (A picture of Joan of Arc.) A little peasant maiden, doing lowly service in the cottage home at Homremy; a mailclad maiden, leading foyth her soldiers from the gates of Orleans; two faithful feet on fagots at Rouen; a radiant face uplifted to the beckoning skies; a crucifix upheld in shriveling, flamekissed hands; a wreath of smoke for shroud, a wrack of smoke for pall, a heap of ashes, and—a franchised soul. In this scientific age—the age of iconoclasm —it is greatly good for us to confront things rich, rare, out-of-the-common things above our power to comprehend, beyond our power to destroy It is well for us who are so blind to the rose-color in our daily lives to be forced to acknowledge its existence in the imperishable canvas of history; well for us, so intensely practical as we are, to be compelled there, at least, to confront the romantic and the heroic.