Rise in the morning, rise
While yet the streaming tide
Flames o'er the blue acclivities,
And pours its splendors wide;
Kindling its high intent
Along the firmament,
Silence and sleep to break,
Imaginations wake,
Ideas insphere
And bring them here.
Loiter nor play
In soft delay;
Speed glad thy course along
The orbs and globes among,
And as yon toiling sun
Attain thy high meridian:
Radiant and round thy day;--
Speed, speed thee on thy way.
"Every day is a festival, and that which makes it the more splendid is
gladness. For as the world is a spacious and beautiful temple, so is
life the most perfect institution that introduces us into it. And it is
but just that it should be full of cheerfulness and tranquillity." Our
dispositions are the atmosphere we breathe, and we carry our climate and
world in ourselves. Good humor, gay spirits are the liberators, the sure
cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the
tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting
imps into angels by the alchymy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight
of these redeemers. And he who smiles never is beyond redemption. Once
clothed in a suit of light we may cast aside forever our sables. Our
best economist of this flowing estate is good temper, without whose
presidency life is a perplexity and disaster. Luck is bad luck and
ourselves a disappointment and vexation. Victims of our humors, we
victimize everybody. How the swift repulsions play: our atoms all
insular, insulating; demonized, demonizing, from heel to crown; at the
mercy of a glance, a gesture, a word, and ourselves overthrown.
Equanimity is the gem in Virtue's chaplet and St. Sweetness the
loveliest in her calendar. "On beholding thyself, fear," says the
oracle. Only the saints are sane and wholesome.
II.--THE CHEAP PHYSICIAN.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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