Let us pray for that great--I had almost said that crowning grace and virtue of Moderation, what St. Paul calls sobriety and a sound mind. Let us pray for moderate appetites, moderate passions, moderate honours, moderate gains, moderate joys; and if sorrows be needed to chasten us, moderate sorrows. Let us not long violently after, or wish too eagerly to rise in life. _Water of Life Sermons_. 1869. Poetry in the Slums. March 26. "True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at home. . . . Hech! is there no the heaven above them there, and the hell beneath them? and God frowning, and the devil grinning? No poetry there! Is no the verra idea of the classic tragedy defined to be man conquered by circumstance? canna ye see it there? And the verra idea of the modern tragedy, man conquering circumstance? and I'll show ye that too--in many a garret where no eye but the good God's enters to see the patience, and the fortitude, and the self-sacrifice, and the love stronger than death, that's shining in those dark places of the earth." "Ah, poetry's grand--but fact is grander; God and Satan are grander. All around ye, in every gin-shop and costermonger's cellar, are God and Satan at death-grips; every garret is a haill Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained." _Alton Locke_, chap. viii. 1849. Time and Eternity. March 27. . . . Our life's floor Is laid upon Eternity; no crack in it But shows the underlying heaven. _Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene ii. Work. March 28. Yes. Life is meant for work, and not for ease; to labour in danger and in dread, to do a little good ere the night comes when no man can work, instead of trying to realise for oneself a paradise; not even Bunyan's shepherd-paradise, much less Fourier's casino-paradise, and perhaps, least of all, because most selfish and isolated of all, our own art-paradise, the apotheosis of loafing, as Claude calls it. _Prose Idylls_. 1849. Teaching of Pictures. March 29. Pictures raise blessed thoughts in me. Why not in you, my toiling brother? Those landscapes painted by loving, wise, old Claude two hundred years ago, are still as fresh as ever. How still the meadows are! How pure and free that vault of deep blue sky! No wonder that thy worn heart, as thou lookest, sighs aloud, "Oh, that I had wings as a dove, then would I flee away and be at rest." Ah! but gayer meadows and bluer skies await thee _in the world to come_--that fairyland made real--"the new heavens and the new earth" which God hath prepared for the pure and the loving, the just, and the brave, who have conquered in this sore fight of life. _True Words for Brave Men_. 1849. Voluntary Heroism. March 30. Any man or woman, in any age and under any circumstances, who _will_, _can_ live the heroic life and exercise heroic influences.