Beacon Lights of History, Volume 06: Renaissance and ReformationLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 06: Renaissance and Reformation
Lord, John
History
cabbages? Is not the rose or tulip as great an addition to even a poor
man's cottage as his bed of onions or patch of potatoes? What is the
scale to measure even mortal happiness? What is the marketable value of
friendship or of love? What makes the dinner of herbs sometimes more
refreshing than the stalled ox? What is the material profit of a first
love? What is the value in tangible dollars and cents of a beautiful
landscape, or a speaking picture, or a marble statue, or a living book,
or the voice of eloquence, or the charm of earliest bird, or the smile
of a friend, or the promise of immortality? In what consisted the real
glory of the country we are never weary of quoting,--the land of Phidias
and Pericles and Demosthenes? Was it not in immaterial ideas, in
patriotism, in heroism, in conceptions of ideal beauty, in speculations
on the infinite and unattainable, in the songs which still inspire the
minds of youth, in the expression which made marble live, in those
conceptions of beauty and harmony which still give shape to the temples
of Christendom? Was Rome more glorious with her fine roads and tables of
thuja-root, and Falernian wines, and oysters from the Lucrine Lake, and
chariots of silver, and robes of purple and rings of gold,--these useful
blessings which are the pride of an Epicurean civilization? And who gave
the last support, who raised the last barrier, against that inundation
of destructive pleasures in which some see the most valued fruits of
human invention, but which proved a canker that prepared the way to
ruin? It was that pious Emperor who learned his wisdom from a slave, and
who set a haughty defiance to all the grandeur and all the comforts of
the highest position which earth could give, and spent his leisure hours
in the quiet study of those truths which elevate the soul,--truths not
taught by science or nature, but by communication with invisible powers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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