Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 23, 2025
To look upon this picture, and sail upon this sea, they had forsaken home and its idols and journeyed thousands and thousands of miles, in weariness and tribulation. What wonder that the sordid lights of work-day prudence should pale before the glory of a hope like theirs in the full splendor of its fruition? Let them squander millions! I said who speaks of money at a time like this?
Out, then, upon that vulgar craving of those who comprehend neither the vast truths of life nor the grandeur of ideal art, and who ask from poet or narrator the poor and petty morality of "Poetical Justice," a justice existing not in our work-day world; a justice existing not in the sombre page of history; a justice existing not in the loftier conceptions of men whose genius has grappled with the enigmas which art and poetry only can foreshadow and divine, unknown to us in the street and the market, unknown to us on the scaffold of the patriot or amidst the flames of the martyr, unknown to us in the Lear and the Hamlet, in the Agamemnon and the Prometheus.
Poetry and the lighter letters became to him not merely a relaxation, but a critical and thoughtful study. He delighted to penetrate into the causes that have made the airy webs spun by men's fancies so permanent and powerful in their influence over the hard, work-day world.
But indeed the streets were not attractive to the child on Sundays: there were no shops open, and the people in their Sunday clothes, many of them with their faces studiously settled into masks intended to express righteousness, were far less interesting, because less alive, than the same people in their work-day attire, in their shops, or seated at their stalls, or driving their carts, and looking thoroughly human.
'Those who descended into the Cave of Trophonius, and beheld the unspeakable, remained astonished for three days, my young friend and so will you! And they went forth together to earn their bread. But what is Hypatia doing all this while, upon that cloudy Olympus, where she sits enshrined far above the noise and struggle of man and his work-day world?
"Oh, then, my Lord Hastings, pray thy patron saint for a war, for in peace thou wouldst be lost amongst the crowd. But truce to these jests; for thou art not the man to prate of youth, virtue, and such like, in sober earnest, amidst this work-day world, where nothing is young and nothing virtuous; and listen to grave matters."
Why shouldn't you become an architect? Why shouldn't you go into a work for which you have evidently remarkable talent? Why shouldn't you become a builder?" "Well," said Susan, smiling, "there is no pressing call for me to earn money. I have had my work-day, and have sufficient means to meet my simple wants. Besides, I am not pining or rusting in idleness.
Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, modern world the vessel steamed up to this city of an olden time and another ideal, to her who was a lady from the first, devout and proud and strong, and who still, after two hundred and fifty years, keeps perfect the image and memory of the feudal past from which she sprung.
You linger before a little printing-press, and as if magical clouds rose and shut out the work-day world, the skies of Greece are overhead and the Ancient searching for his lever with which to move the world passes down the room and lingers with you; for surely he has found the lever, and surely the world has been moved with it, the boundaries of empires broken up, kings discrowned, republics ruined.
Jerome, in the arbor with three happy young people, taking for the first time since his childhood a holiday on a work-day, seemed to comprehend the first notes of that great harmony of life which proves by the laws of sequence the last. The premonition of some final blessedness, to survive all renunciation and sacrifice, was upon him. He felt raised above the earth with happiness.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking