Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 2: Renaissance and ReformationLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 2: Renaissance and Reformation
Lord, John
History
the lawn as desirable as beans and turnips and 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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