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Upon the second Sabbath being the day before the county court should sit a substitute filled the pulpit of Mr. Willcoxen, and his congregation reassembled to hear an edifying discourse from the text: "I myself have seen the ungodly in great power, and flourishing like a green bay-tree. I went by, and lo! he was gone; I sought him, but his place was nowhere to be found."
"You may cut off all you like, and wear your old clothes, but there's a liveliness about taxes that takes the sand out of you. Talk about the green bay-tree flourishing and increasing, all a tax wants is to be let alone a few years. It'll come to its full growth without any sunning or watering. Mine have had to be left alone for a while, and well, here we are another year, and "
It is very edifying and profitable to create a world out of your own brains, and people it with inhabitants, who are so many Melchisedecs, and have no father nor mother but your own imagination . . . I am sorry I did not exist fifty or sixty years ago, when the 'Ladies' Magazine' was flourishing like a green bay-tree.
Again, we know that the bay-tree, or laurel, was dedicated to the oracular Pythian Apollo.
If further confirmation were needed of the story that Virgil was laid here, it would be found in the fact that Silius Italicus, who lived at the same time with Statius, purchased the tomb of Virgil, restored it from the neglect into which it had fallen, and celebrated funeral rites before it. The tomb was originally shaded by a gigantic bay-tree, which is said to have died on the death of Dante.
In olden times the decay of the bay-tree was considered an omen of disaster, and it is stated that, previous to the death of Nero, though the winter was very mild, all these trees withered to the roots, and that a great pestilence in Padua was preceded by the same phenomenon. Shakespeare speaks of this superstition:
Many a quack, flourishing like a green bay-tree, was summarily brought to the "end of his tether," by this most wise legislative enactment.
Below it was a great bunch of heavy leaves. "So you have come to call on me, have you?" said the lady in the tree. "I am glad to see you, but I'm sorry that I cannot ask you to come upstairs. I am not receiving." "He could not come up if he wanted to," said Lena; "he couldn't climb a tree like that." "And he doesn't want to," cried the nymph of the bay-tree.
The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must be prepared to tread the winepress alone. He may indeed flourish like the bay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will rather resemble a reed shaken by the wind. Whether starved or fed by the accidents of fortune he must find his essential life in his own ideal. In spiritual life, heteronomy is suicide.
Pope continued to flourish like a green bay-tree, or like the proprietors of a patent medicine or a blackguard newspaper, or any other comparison you please. Feet tramped along the hall, hands knocked at his door, lips innumerable whispered into his ears, and Mrs. Tarbell sat and looked at her sign, wondering what had become of all the women who were to have employed her.
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