United States or Guyana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He imagined what his home would have been with other women whom he knew, and he confessed that with them he would have been less contented. He acknowledged that he had been guilty of a kind of criminal epicurism; that he rejected in foolish, fatal, nay, even wicked indifference, the bread of life upon which he might have lived and thriven. His whole effort now was to suppress himself in his wife.
And so away to Stevenage, and staid till a showre was over, and so rode easily to Welling, where we supped well, and had two beds in the room and so lay single, and still remember it that of all the nights that ever I slept in my life I never did pass a night with more epicurism of sleep; there being now and then a noise of people stirring that waked me, and then it was a very rainy night, and then I was a little weary, that what between waking and then sleeping again, one after another, I never had so much content in all my life, and so my wife says it was with her.
Except in these two points, how the world went in books, the magistrate kept no reckoning. And therefore Lucretius without impeachment versifies his Epicurism to Memmius, and had the honour to be set forth the second time by Cicero, so great a father of the Commonwealth; although himself disputes against that opinion in his own writings.
And in this volume, the record of seventeen years, we have the result of those spiritual experiences in a form calculated, as we believe, to be a priceless benefit to many an earnest seeker in this generation, and perhaps to stir up some who are priding themselves on a cold dilettantism and barren epicurism, into something like a living faith and hope.
It imparts a stimulus for the time, and produces a sort of intellectual keenness and cleverness; but, without an implanted purpose and a higher object that mere pleasure, it will bring with it no solid advantage. In such cases knowledge produces but a passing impression; a sensation, gut no more; it is, in fact, the merest epicurism of intelligence sensuous, but certainly not intellectual.
Oh, what precious things were said and looked at those banquets of the soul! There epicurism was in the lip as well as the palate, and one had humour for a hors d'oeuvre and repartee for an entremet. One's intellectual appetite, like the physical, is coarse but dull. At dinner one is fit only for eating; after dinner only for politics. But supper was a glorious relic of the ancients.
He did not perceive what in fact was the case that the tastes and sympathies of each, blunted by that disappointment which is the child of experience, were more willing to concede somewhat to the tastes and sympathies of the other; that Constance gave a more indulgent listening to his beautiful refinements of an ideal and false epicurism; that he, smiling still, smiled with kindness, not with scorn, at the sanguine politics, the worldly schemes, and the rankling memories of the intriguing Constance.
The recipes may be thought extravagant in these late hard times though epicurism has changed rather than vanished. Lord Bacon's receipt for making "Manus Christi for the Stomach" begins, "Take of the best pearls very finely pulverised one drachm"; and a health resolution runs, "To take once during supper wine in which gold is quenched."
Her institutions were based upon idolatry in religion, slavery in the State, and epicurism in private life; to touch those was to shake society to its foundations, and, to use our modern expression, to open the abyss of revolutions. So the idea occurred to no one; and yet humanity was dying in blood and luxury. All at once a man appeared, calling himself The Word of God.
It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. The heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion. The incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The giver is veiled by his gifts.
Word Of The Day