My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky; So was it when my life began, So is it now I am a man, So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die. The child is father of the man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. --WORDSWORTH Be but yourself, be pure, be true, And prompt in duty; heed the deep Low voice of conscience; through the ill And discord round about you, keep Your faith in human nature still. --ELIZABETH WHITTIER Four things a man must learn to do If he would make his record true; To think, without confusion, clearly; To love his fellow-men sincerely: To act from honest motives purely; To trust in God and Heaven securely. --HENRY VAN DYKE Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar; The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel. --SHAKESPEARE Never do anything of which you will have cause to be ashamed. There is one good opinion which is of the greatest importance to you, namely, your own. "An easy conscience", says Seneca, "is a continual feast".--LUBBOCK There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. --SHAKESPEARE Man is his own star, and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate, Nothing for him falls early or too late; Our acts our angels are, for good or ill; Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. --BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar, Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home. --WORDSWORTH