英语等级考试六级晨读英语美文100篇六级(免费下载)

并且他们可能连接到男人的世界

,

,

无情的

,< /p>

愉快的

,

唉

,< /p>

和有吸引力的因为他表明当应用在其中。

被他们自己

,

他们做的事情

,

但似乎他们不

;

他们看起来像美德远的时候

,

但他们会侦测到接近观察员

,

在长期内

;

从而

,

指控虚伪是普遍和虚伪

,

再说一次< /p>

,

我从自己的错

,

但因为他们的教授和他们的仰慕者坚持以他们为他们所不是的

,

并在对他们

arrogating

爱管 闲事的赞美

,

他们没有要求。

采石场用剃刀就可以开采出花岗岩

,

或者用一 根线泊位船只丝的

,

然后你会希望这样的激烈

,

精密的仪器作为人类知识

人类理性抗争

,

对那些巨人

,

Passage 2. “Packing” a Person

A person, like a commodity, needs packaging.

But going too far is absolutely undesirable.

A little exaggeration, however, does no harm

when it shows the person's unique qualities to their advantage.

To display personal charm in a casual and natural way,

it is important for one to have a clear knowledge of oneself.

A master packager knows how to integrate art and nature without any traces of embellishment,

so that the person so packaged is no commodity but a human being, lively and lovely.

A young person, especially a female, radiant with beauty and full of life,

has all the favor granted by God.

Any attempt to make up would be self-defeating.

Youth, however, comes and goes in a moment of doze.

Packaging for the middle-aged is primarily to conceal the furrows ploughed by time.

If you still enjoy life's exuberance enough to retain self-confidence

and pursue pioneering work, you are unique in your natural qualities,

and your charm and grace will remain.

Elderly people are beautiful if their river of life has been,

through plains, mountains and jungles, running its course as it should.

You have really lived your life which now arrives at a complacent stage of serenity

indifferent to fame or wealth.

There is no need to resort to hair- dyeing

；

the snow- capped mountain is itself a beautiful scene of fairyland.

Let your looks change from young to old synchronizing with the natural ageing process

so as to keep in harmony with nature, for harmony itself is beauty,

while the other way round will only end in unpleasantness.

To be in the elder's company is like reading a thick book of deluxe edition

that fascinates one so much as to be reluctant to part with.

As long as one finds where one stands, one knows how to package oneself,

just as a commodity establishes its brand by the right packaging.

Passage 3. Three Passions I Have Lived for

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life:

the longing for love, the search for knowledge,

and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither,

in a wayward course over a deep ocean of anguish,

reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy

—

ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life

for a few hours for this joy.

I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness

—

that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness

looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.

I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen,

in a mystic miniature,

the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.

This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life,

this is what

—

at last

—

I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.

I have wished to understand the hearts of men.

I have wished to know why the stars shine ...

A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens.

But always pity brought me back to earth.

Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart.

Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people

—

a hated burden to their sons,

and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should

be.

I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life.

I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again

if the chance were offered me.

Passage 4. A Little Girl

Sitting on a grassy grave, beneath one of the windows of the church, was a little girl.

With her head bent back she was gazing up at the sky and singing,

while one of her little hands was pointing to a tiny cloud

that hovered like a golden feather above her head.

The sun, which had suddenly become very bright, shining on her glossy hair,

gave it a metallic luster, and it was difficult to say what was the color, dark bronze or black.

So completely absorbed was she in watching the cloud to which her strange song or incantation

seemed addressed,

that she did not observe me when I rose and went towards her.

Over her head, high up in the blue,

a lark that was soaring towards the same gauzy cloud was singing, as if in rivalry.

As I slowly approached the child,

I could see by her forehead, which in the sunshine seemed like a globe of pearl,

and especially by her complexion, that she uncommonly lovely.

Her eyes, which at one moment seemed blue-gray, at another violet,

were shaded by long black lashes, curving backward in a most peculiar way,

and these matched in hue her eyebrows,

and the tresses that were tossed about her tender throat were quivering in the sunlight.

All this I did not take in at once;

for at first I could see nothing but those quivering, glittering, changeful eyes turned up into my

face.

Gradually the other features, especially the sensitive full-lipped mouth,

grew upon me as I stood silently gazing.

Here seemed to me a more perfect beauty than had ever come to me in my loveliest dreams of

beauty.

Yet it was not her beauty so much as the look she gave me that fascinated me, melted me.

Passage 5 Declaration of Independence

When in the Course of human events,

it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands

which have connected them with another,

and to assume among the powers of the earth,

the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind

requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,

that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

—

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,

deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

—

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,

it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,

and to institute new Government,

laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form,

as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established

should not be changed for light and transient causes;

and accordingly all experience has shown,

that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable,

than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations,

pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them

under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty,

to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

—

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies;

and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,

all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Passage 6. A Tribute to the Dog

The best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy.

His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful.

Those who are nearest and dearest to us,

those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name,

may become traitors to their faith.

The money that a man has he may lose.

It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most.

A man?s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill

-considered action.

The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us

may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads.

The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world,

the one that never deserts him,

the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog.

A man?s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness.

He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely,

if only he may be near his master?s side.

He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer;

he will lick the wounds and sores that come from encounter with the roughness of the world.

He will guard the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince.

When all other friends desert, he remains.

When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces,

he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journeys through the heavens.

If fortune drives the master forth, an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless,

the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him,

to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies.

And when the last scene of all comes, and death takes the master in its embrace,

and his body is laid away in the cold ground,

no matter if all other friends pursue their way,

there by the grave will the noble dog be found,

his head between his paws, his eyes sad but open in alert watchfulness,

faithful and true even in death.

Passage 7. Knowledge and Progress

Why does the idea of progress loom so large in the modern world?

Surely because progress of a particular kind is actually taking place around us

and is becoming more and more manifest.

Although mankind has undergone no general improvement in intelligence or morality,

it has made extraordinary progress in the accumulation of knowledge.

Knowledge began to increase as soon as the thoughts of one individual

could be communicated to another by means of speech.

With the invention of writing

，

a great advance was made,

for knowledge could then be not only communicated but also stored.

Libraries made education possible, and education in its turn added to libraries:

the growth of knowledge followed a kind of compound interest law,

which was greatly enhanced by the invention of printing.

All this was comparatively slow until, with the coming of science,

the tempo was suddenly raised.

Then knowledge began to be accumulated according to a systematic plan.

The trickle became a stream;

the stream has now become a torrent.

Moreover, as soon as new knowledge is acquired, it is now turned to practical account.

What

is

called

“modern

civilization”

is

not

the

result

of

a

balanced

development

of

all

man's

nature,

but of accumulated knowledge applied to practical life.

The problem now facing humanity is:

What is going to be done with all this knowledge?

As is so often pointed out, knowledge is a two-edged weapon

which can be used equally for good or evil.

It is now being used indifferently for both.

Could any spectacle, for instance, be more grimly weird

than that of gunners using science to shatter men's bodies while, close at hand,

surgeons use it to restore them?

We have to ask ourselves very seriously what will happen if this twofold use of knowledge,

with its ever-increasing power, continues.

Passage 8. Address by Engels

On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon,

the greatest living thinker ceased to think.

He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes,

and when we came back we found him in his armchair,

peacefully gone to sleep

—

but forever.

An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America,

and by historical science, in the death of this man.

The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit

will soon enough make itself felt.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature,

so Marx discovered the law of development of human history:

the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology,

that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing,

before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.;

that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence

and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people

or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions,

the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion,

of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore,

be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

But that is not all.

Marx

also

discovered

the

special

law

of

motion

governing

the

present-day

capitalist

mode

of

production

and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created.

The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem,

in trying to solve which all previous investigations,

of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime.

Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery.

But in every single field which Marx investigated

—

and he investigated very many fields,

none of them superficially

—

in every field, even in that of mathematics,

he made independent discoveries.

Passage 9. Relationship that Lasts

If somebody tells you,“ I?ll love you for ever,” will you be

lieve it?

I don?t think there?s any reason not to.

We are ready to believe such commitment at the moment,

whatever change may happen afterwards.

As for the belief in an everlasting love, that?s another thing.

Then you may be asked whether there is such a thing as an everlasting love.

I?d answer I believe in it, but an everlasting love is not immutable.

You may unswervingly love or be loved by a person.

But love will change its composition with the passage of time.

It will not remain the same.

In the course of your growth and as a result of your increased experience,

love will become something different to you.

In the beginning you believed a fervent love for a person could last definitely.

By and by, however, “fervent” gave way to “prosaic”.

Precisely because of this change it became possible for love to last.

Then what was meant by an everlasting love would eventually end up in a sort of interdependence.

We used to insist on the difference between love and liking.

The former seemed much more beautiful than the latter.

One day, however, it turns out there?s really no need to make such difference.

Liking is actually a sort of love.

By the same token, the everlasting interdependence is actually an everlasting love.

I wish I could believe there was somebody who would love me for ever.

That?s, as we all know, too romantic to be true.

Instead, it will more often than not be a case of lasting relationship.

Passage 10. Rush

Swallows may have gone, but there is a time of return;

willow trees may have died back, but there is a time of regreening;

peach blossoms may have fallen, but they will bloom again.

Now, you the wise, tell me, why should our days leave us, never to return?

If they had been stolen by someone, who could it be?

Where could he hide them?

If they had made the escape themselves, then where could they stay at the moment?

I don?t know how many days I have been given to spend,

but I do feel my hands are getting empty.

Taking stock silently, I find that more than eight thousand days have already slid away from me.

Like a drop of water from the point of a needle disappearing into the ocean,

my days are dripping into the stream of time, soundless, traceless.

Already sweat is starting on my forehead, and tears welling up in my eyes.

Those that have gone have gone for good, those to come keep coming;

yet in between, how fast is the shift, in such a rush?

When I get up in the morning,

the slanting sun marks its presence in my small room in two or three oblongs.

The sun has feet, look, he is treading on, lightly and furtively;

and I am caught, blankly, in his revolution.

Thus

—

the day flows away through the sink when I wash my hands,

wears off in the bowl when I eat my meal,

and passes away before my day- dreaming gaze as reflect in silence.

I can feel his haste now, so I reach out my hands to hold him back,

but he keeps flowing past my withholding hands.

In the evening, as I lie in bed, he strides over my body, glides past my feet, in his agile way.

The moment I open my eyes and meet the sun again, one whole day has gone.

I bury my face in my hands and heave a sigh.

But the new day begins to flash past in the sigh.

What can I do, in this bustling world, with my days flying in their escape?

Nothing but to hesitate, to rush.

What have I been doing in that eight-thousand-day rush, apart from hesitating?

Those bygone days have been dispersed as smoke by a light wind,

or evaporated as mist by the morning sun.

What traces have I left behind me?

Have I ever left behind any gossamer traces at all?

I have come to the world, stark naked;

am I to go back, in a blink, in the same stark nakedness?

It is not fair though:

why should I have made such a trip for nothing!

You the wise, tell me,

why should our days leave us, never to return?

Passage 11. A Summer Day

One day thirty years ago Marseilles lay in the burning sun.

A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France

than at any other time before or since.

Everything in Marseilles and about Marseilles had stared at the fervid sun,

and had been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there.

Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses,

staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away.

The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring

were the vines drooping under their loads of grapes.

These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.

The universal stare made the eyes ache.

Towards the distant blue of the Italian coast, indeed,

it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist

slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea,

but it softened nowhere else.

Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages,

and the monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade,

dropped beneath the stare of earth and sky.

So did the horses with drowsy bells, in long files of carts,

creeping slowly towards the interior;

so did their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened;

so did the exhausted laborers in the fields.

Everything that lived or grew was oppressed by the glare;

except the lizard, passing swiftly over rough stone walls,

and cicada, chirping its dry hot chirp, like a rattle.

The very dust was scorched brown,

and something quivered in the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting.

Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to deep out the stare.

Grant it but a chink or a keyhole,

and it shot in like a white- hot arrow.

Passage 12. Night

Night has fallen over the country.

Through the trees rises the red moon and the stars are scarcely seen.

In the vast shadow of night, the coolness and the dews descend.

I sit at the open window to enjoy them; and hear only the voice of the summer wind.

Like black hulks, the shadows of the great trees ride at anchor on the billowy sea of grass.

I cannot see the red and blue flowers, but I know that they are there.

Far away in the meadow gleams the silver Charles.

The tramp of horses' hoofs sounds from the wooden bridge.

Then all is still save the continuous wind or the sound of the neighboring sea.

The village clock strikes; and I feel that I am not alone.

How different it is in the city!

It is late, and the crowd is gone.

You step out upon the balcony, and lie in the very bosom of the cool,

dewy night as if you folded her garments about you.

Beneath lies the public walk with trees, like a fathomless, black gulf.

The lamps are still burning up and down the long street.

People go by with grotesque shadows, now foreshortened,

and now lengthening away into the darkness and vanishing,

while a new one springs up behind the walker,

and seems to pass him revolving like the sail of a windmill.

The iron gates of the park shut with a jangling clang.

There are footsteps and loud voices;

—

a tumult;

—

a drunken brawl;

—

an alarm of fire;

—

then

silence again.

And now at length the city is asleep, and we can see the night.

The belated moon looks over the roofs, and finds no one to welcome her.

The moonlight is broken.

It lies here and there in the squares and the opening of the streets

—

angular like blocks of white marble.

Passage

13.

Peace

and

Development:

the

Themes

of

Our

Times

Peace and development are the themes of the times.

People across the world should join hands in advancing the lofty cause of peace and development

of mankind.

A peaceful environment is indispensable for national,

regional and even global development.

Without peace or political stability there would be no economic progress to speak of.

This has been fully proved by both the past and the present.

In today?s world, the international situation is, on the whole, moving towards relaxation.

However, conflicts and even local wars triggered by various factors have kept cropping up,

and tension still remains in some areas.

All this has impeded the economic development of the countries and regions concerned,

and has also adversely affected the world economy.

All responsible statesmen and governments must abide by the purposes of the UN Charter

and the universally acknowledged norms governing international relations,

and work for a universal, lasting and comprehensive peace.

Nobody should be allowed to cause tension or armed conflicts against the interests of the people.

There are still in this world a few interest groups,

which always want to seek gains by creating tension here and there.

This is against the will of the majority of the people and against the trend of the times.

An enormous market demand can be created and economic prosperity promoted

only when continued efforts are made to advance the cause of peace and development,

to ensure that people around the world live and work in peace and contentment

and focus on economic development and on scientific and technological innovation.

I hope that all of us here today will join hands with all other peace-loving people

and work for lasting world peace and the common development and prosperity

of all nations and regions.

Passage 14. Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is the combination of self- confidence and self-respect

—

the conviction that you are competent to cope w

ith life?s challenges

and are worthy of happiness.

Self-esteem is the way you talk to yourself about yourself.

Self- esteem has two interrelated aspects;

it entails a sense of personal efficacy and a sense of personal worth.

It is the integrated sum of self-confidence and self-respect.

It is the conviction that one is competent to live and worthy of living.

Our self-esteem and self-image are developed by how we talk to ourselves.

All of us have conscious and unconscious memories of all the times we felt bad or wrong

—

they are part of the unavoidable scars of childhood.

This is where the critical voice gets started.

Everyone has a critical inner voice.

People with low self-esteem simply have a more vicious and demeaning inner voice.

Psychologists say that almost every aspect of our lives

—

our

personal

happiness,

success,

relationships

with

others,

achievement,

creativity,

dependencies

—

are dependent on our level of self-esteem.

The more we have, the better we deal with things.

Positive self-esteem is important because when people experience it,

they feel good and look good, they are effective and productive,

and they respond to other people and themselves in healthy, positive, growing ways.

People who have positive self-esteem know that they are lovable and capable,

and they care about themselves and other people.

They do not have to build themselves up by tearing other people down

or by patronizing less competent people.

Our background largely determines what we will become in personality

and more importantly in self-esteem.

Where do feelings of worthlessness come from?

Many come from our families,

since more than 80% of our waking hours up to the age of eighteen

are spent under their direct influence.

We are who we are because of where we?ve been.

We build our own brands of self-esteem from four ingredients:

fate, the positive things life offers, the negative things life offers

and our own decisions about how to respond to fate, the positives and the negatives.

Neither fate nor decisions can be determined by other people in our own life.

No one can change fate.

We can control our thinking and therefore our decisions in life.

Passage 15. Struggle for Freedom

It is not possible for me to express all that I feel of appreciation

for what has been said and given to me.

I accept, for myself, with the conviction of having received

far beyond what I have been able to give in my books.

I can only hope that the many books which I have yet to write

will be in some measure a worthier acknowledgment than I can make tonight.

And, indeed, I can accept only in the same spirit

in which I think this gift was originally given

—

that it is a prize not so much for what has been done, as for the future.

Whatever I write in the future must, I think,

be always benefited and strengthened when I remember this day.

I accept,too, for my country,the United States of America.

We are a people still young and we know that we have not yet come to the fullest of our powers.

This award, given to an American, strengthens not only one,

but the whole body of American writers,

who are encouraged and heartened by such generous recognition.

And I should like to say, too, that in my country

it is important that this award has been given to a woman.

You who have already so recognized your own Selma Lagerlof,

and have long recognized women in other fields,

cannot perhaps wholly understand what it means in many countries

that it is a woman who stands here at this moment.

But I speak not only for writers and for women, but for all Americans,

for we all share in this.

I should not be truly myself if I did not, in my own wholly unofficial way,

speak also of the people of China,whose life has for so many years been my life also,

whose life,indeed, must always be a part of my life.

The minds of my own country and China, my foster country, are alike in many ways,

but above all, alike in our common love of freedom.

And today more than ever, this is true,

now when China's whole being is engaged in the greatest of all the struggles,

the struggle for freedom.

I have never admired China more than I do now,

when I see her uniting as she has never before,

against the enemy who threatens her freedom.

With this determination for freedom,

which is in so profound a sense the essential quality of her nature,

I know that she is unconquerable.

Freedom

—

it is today more than ever the most precious human possession.

We

—

Sweden and the United States

—

we have it still.

My country is young

—

but it greets you with a peculiar fellowship,

you whose earth is ancient and free.

Passage 16. Passing on Small Change

The pharmacist handed me my prescription,apologized for the wait,

and explained that his register had already closed.

He asked if I would mind using the register at the front of the store.

I told him not to worry and walked up front,

where one person was in line ahead of me,

a little girl no more than seven, with a bottle of medicine on the counter.

She clenched a little green and white striped coin purse closely to her chest.

The purse reminded me of the days when, as a child,

I played dress-up

in my grandma?s closet.

I?d march around the house in oversized clothes,

drenched in costume jewelry and hats and scarves,

talking “grownup talk” to anyone who would listen.

I remembered the thrill one day when I gave a pretend dollar to someone,

and he handed back some real coins for me to put into my special purse.

“

Keep the change!”he told me with a wink.

Now the clerk rang up the little girl?s medicine,

while she shakily pulled out a coupon, a dollar bill and some coins.

I watched her blush as she tried to count her money,

and I could see right away that she was about a dollar short.

With a quick wink to the clerk,

I slipped a dollar bill onto the counter and signaled the clerk to ring up the sale.

The child scooped her uncounted change into her coin purse,

grabbed her package and scurried out the door.

As I headed to my car, I felt a tug on my shirt.

There was the girl, looking up at me with her big brown eyes.

She gave me a grin, wrapped her arms around my legs for a long moment

then stretched out her little hand.

It was full of coins.“Thank you,” She whispered.

“

That?s okay,” I answered.

I flashed her a smile and winked,“Keep the change!”

Passage 17. The Props to Help Man Endure (I)

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work,

a

life?s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit.

Not for glory and least of all, for profit,

but to create out of the material of the human spirit something which did not exist before.

So this award is only mine in trust.

It would not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it,

commensurate for the purpose and significance of its origin.

But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too

by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to

by the young men and woman,already dedicated to the same anguish and travail,

among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now

that we can even bear it.

There?re no longer problems of the spirit, there?s only the question;

“

When will I be blown up?”

Because of this, the young man or woman writing today

has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself,

which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about,

worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again, he must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid,

and teaching himself that,forget it forever,

leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart.

The old universal truths, lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed:

love and honor and pity and pride,

and compassion and sacrifice.

Passage 18. The Props to Help Man Endure (II)

Until he does so, he labors under a curse.

He writes not of love, but of lust,

of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value,

of victories without hope, and most of all, without pity or compassion.

His grief weaves on no universal bone, leaving no scars.

He writes not of the heart, but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things,

he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man.

I decline to accept the end of man.

It?s easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure:

that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged

and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tireless in the last red and dying evening,

that even then, there will still be one more sound:

that of his puny and inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this.

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,

but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion,and sacrifice, and endurance.

The poets?, the writers? duty is to writ

e about these things.

It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,

by reminding him of the courage,and honor

and hope and compassion and pity

and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

The poets' voice need not merely be the record of man,

it can be one of the props,

the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Passage 19. What Is Immortal

To see the golden sun and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean,

to walk upon the green earth, and to be lord of a thousand creatures,

to look down giddy precipices or over distant flowery vales,

to see the world spread out under one?s finger in a map,

to bring the stars near, to view the smallest insects in a microscope,

to read history,and witness the revolutions of empires and the succession of generations,

to hear of the glory of Sidon and Tyre, of Babylon and Susa, as of a faded pageant,

and to say all these were, and are now nothing,

to think that we exist in such a point of time,and in such a corner of space,

to be at once spectators and a part of the moving scene,

to watch the return of the seasons, of spring and autumn, to hear

—

The stock dove?s notes amid the forest deep,

That drowsy forest rustles to the sighing gale.

—

to traverse desert wilderness,to listen to the dungeon's gloom,

or sit in crowded theatres and see life itself mocked,

to feel heat and cold, pleasure and pain, right and wrong, truth and falsehood,

to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony,

to worship fame and to dream of immortality,

to have read Shakespeare and Beloit to the same species as Sir Isaac Newton;

to be and to do all this, and then in a moment

to be nothing,to have it all snatched from one

like a juggler? ball or a phantasmagoria...

Passage 20. Suppose Someone Gave You a Pen

Suppose someone gave you a pen

—

a sealed, solid-colored pen.

You couldn?t see how much ink it had.

It might run dry after the first few tentative words

or last just long enough to create a masterpiece (or several)

that would last forever and make a difference in the scheme of things.

You don?t know before you begin.

Under the rules of the game, you really never know.

You have to take a chance!

Actually, no rule of the game states you must do anything.

Instead of picking up and using the pen,

you could leave it on a shelf or in a drawer where it will dry up, unused.

But if you do decide to use it, what would you do with it?

How would you play the game?

Would you plan and plan before you ever wrote a word?

Would your plans be so extensive that you never even got to the writing?

Or would you take the pen in hand, plunge right in and just do it,

struggling to keep up with the twists and turns of the torrents of words that take you where they

take you?

Would you write cautiously and carefully,as if the pen might run dry the next moment,

or would you pretend or believe (or pretend to believe)

that the pen will write forever and proceed accordingly?

And of what would you write:

Of love? Hate? Fun? Misery? Life? Death? Nothing? Everything?

Would you write to please just yourself? Or others?

Or yourself by writing for others?

Would your strokes be tremblingly timid or brilliantly bold?

Fancy with a flourish or plain?

Would you even write?

Once you have the pen, no rule says you have to write.

Would you sketch? Scribble? Doodle or draw?

Would you stay in or on the lines, or see no lines at all, even if they were there?

Or are they?

There?s a lot to think about here,isn?t there?

Now, suppose someone gave you a life...

Passage 21. Two Ways of Thinking of History

There are two ways of thinking of history.

There is, first, history regarded as a way of looking at other things,

really the temporal aspect of anything,

from the universe to this nib with which I am writing.

Everything has its history.

There is the history of the universe,if only we knew it

—

and we know something of it, if we do not know much.

Nor is the contrast so great,when you come to think of it,

between the universe and this pen-nib.

A mere pen-nib has quite a considerable history.

There is, to begin with, what has been written with it,

and that might be something quite important.

After all it was probably only one quill-pen or a couple that wrote Hamlet.

Whatever has been written with the pen- nib is part of its History.

In addition to that there is the history of its manufacture:

this particular nib is a “Relief” nib, No. 314,

made by R. Esterbrook and Co. in England,

who supply the Midland Bank with pen-nibs, from whom I got it

—

a gift, I may say.

But behind this nib there is the whole process of manufacture....

In fact a pen nib implies universe,and the history of it implies its history.

We may regard this way of looking at it

—

history

—

as the time-aspect of all things:

a pen-nib, the universe,the fiddle before me as I write,

as a relative conception of history.

There is, secondly, what we might call a substantive conception of history,

what we usually mean by it, history proper as a subject of study in itself.

Passage 22. On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth

No young man believes he will ever die.

It was a saying of my br

other?s, and a fine one.

There is a feeling of Eternity in youth,which makes us amend for everything.

To be young is to be as one of the Immortal Gods.

One half of time indeed is flown

—

the other half remains in store for us with all its countless treasures,

for there is no line drawn, and we see no limit to our hopes and wishes.

We make the coming age our own

—

The vast, the unbounded prospect lies before us.

Death, old age, are words without a meaning that pass by us

like the idea air which we regard not.

Others may have undergone,or may still be liable to them

—we“bear a charmed life”,

which laughs to scorn all such sickly fancies.

As in setting out on delightful journey,we strain our eager gaze forward

—

Bidding the lovely scenes at distance hail!

And see no end to the landscape, new objects presenting themselves as we advance.

So, in the commencement of life, we set no bounds to our inclinations,

nor to the unrestricted opportunities of gratifying them.

We have as yet found no obstacle,no disposition to flag;

and it seems that we can go on so forever.

We look round in a new world,full of life, and motion, and ceaseless progress,

and feel in ourselves all the vigor and spirit to keep pace with it,

and do not foresee from any present symptoms how we shall be left behind

in the natural course of things, decline into old age, and drop into the grave.

It is the simplicity, and as it were abstractedness of our feelings in youth,

that (so to speak) identifies us with nature,

and (our experience being slight and our passions strong)

deludes us into a belief of being immortal like it.

Passage 23. Of Studies

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.

Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring;

for ornament, is in discourse;

and for ability, is in the judgement and disposition of business.

For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one;

but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs,

come best from those that are learned.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth;

to use them too much for ornament,is affectation;

to make judgement wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar.

They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience:

for natural abilities are like natural plants,that need pruning by study;

and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large,

except they be bounded in by experience.

Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them;

for they teach not their own use;

but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

Read not to contradict and confute;

nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse;

but to weigh and consider.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,and some few to be chewed and digested;

that is, some books are to be read only in parts;

others to be read, but not curiously;

and some few to be read wholly,and with diligence and attention.

Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others;

but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books;

else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy things.

Reading makes a full man

；

conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

And therefore,if a man write little

，

he had need have a great memory;

if he confer little, he had need have a present wit;

and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he does not.

Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle;

natural philosophy deep; moral grave;

logic and rhetoric able to contend.

Passage 24. Of Media

International media such as TV network and magazine

always give people in an information age mixed feelings.

Like many other things, media is double-edged.

As primary channels of information,

TV

and

magazine

are

convenient

and

economic

sources

of

information

for

knowledge,

entertainment, and shopping.

Interestingly,sometimes the same piece of information varies considerably

in its influences on audiences of different age.

For example,in a TV commercial,a beautiful lady promotes a certain brand of perfume,

which supposablely makes girls more attractive to boys.

For potential grown-up buyers,

the ad is useful because they might be spending time searching for such products.

We save time in shopping and making decision by making use of such advertisements.

However, a teenage girl might get the wrong idea about the concept of perfume.

She could get money from her parents to buy the advertised product.

Worse yet, she might use the appeal strategy employed in the commercial

to get ahead in the future.

This is classic bad influence of media for young people?s overspending

and inappropriate behaviors.

However, we find it very difficult to weigh between merits and problems of media

because they are often tightly incorporated.

For instance, violent scenes in movies are believed to be

partially responsible for violence- related crimes,

particularly those committed by young people.

But

on

the

contrary,such

movies

also

give

people

a

channel

to

release

their

anger,anxiety,

and

pressure.

Moreover,these movies show us bad and evil as well as punishments for wrongdoings.

Imagine we live in a world whose media is completely clean in such sense.

The dark side of media does not disappear just because we do not talk about it.

Nevertheless certain kinds of information such as porn are better kept away from young people.

In conclusion, media should not be seen simply as bad or good

because we need to use information properly to the best of our ability.

But for certain segments of viewers,

we should be very careful with regard to the content of information

and take measures to keep viewers from possible harmful influences of media.

Passage 25. How to Be Ture to Yourself

My grandparents believed you were either

honest or you weren?t.

There was no in between.

They had a simple motto hanging on heir living-room wall:

“

Life is like a field of newly fallen snow;

where I choose to walk every step will show.”

They didn?t have to talk about it—

they demonstrated the motto by the way they lived.

They understood instinctively that integrity means

having a personal standard of morality and ethics

that does not sell out to selfishness and that is not relative to the situation at hand.

Integrity is an inner standard for judging your behavior.

Unfortunately,integrity is in short supply today

—

and getting scarcer.

But it is the real bottom line in every area of society.

And it is something we must demand of ourselves.

A good test for this value is to look at what I call the Integrity Trial,

which consists of three key principles:

Stand firmly for your convictions in the face of personal pressure.

When you know you?re right, you can?t back down.

Always give others credit that is rightfully theirs.

Don?t be afraid of those who might

have a better idea

or who might even be smarter than you are.

Be honest and open about who you really are.

People who lack genuine core values rely on external factors

—

their looks or status

—

in order to feel good about themselves.

Inevitably they will do everything they can to preserve this appearance,

but they will do very little, to develop their inner value and personal growth.

So be yourself.

Don?t engage in a personal cover

-up of areas that are unpleasing in your life.

When it?s tough, do it tough. In

other words,

face reality and be adult in your responses to life?s challenges.

Self-respect and a clear conscience are powerful components of integrity

and are the basis for enriching your relationships with others.

Integrity means you do what you do becau

se it?s right

and not just fashionable or politically correct.

A life of principle, of not giving in to the seductive sirens of easy morality,

will always win the day.

It will take you forward into the 21st century

without having to check your tacks in a rearview mirror.

My grandparents taught me that.

Passage 26. Five Balls of Life

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air.

You name them work, family,health, friends and spirit

and you?re keeping all of these in the air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball.

If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four balls family, health, friends and spirit are made of glass.

If

you

drop

one

of

these,

they

will

be

irrevocably

scuffed,

marked,

nicked,

damaged

or

even

shattered.

They will never be the same.

You must understand that and strive for balance in your life. How?

Don?t undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others.

It is because we are different that each of us is special.

Don?t set your goals by

what other people deem important.

Only you know what is best for you.

Don?t take for granted the things closest to your heart.

Cling to them as they would be your life, for without them, life is meaningless.

Don?t let your life slip through your fingers b

y living in the past or for the future.

By living your life one day at a time, you live ALL the days of your life.

Don?t give up when you still have something to give.

Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.

Don?t be afraid to admit that y

ou are less than perfect.

It is this fragile thread that binds us to each together.

Don?t be afraid to encounter risks.

It is by taking chances that we learn how to be brave.

Don?t shut love out of your life by saying it?s impossible to find.

The quickest way to receive love is to give it;

the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly;

and the best way to keep love is to give it wings.

Don?t run through life so fast that you forget not only where you?ve been,

but also where you are going.

Don?t forget, a person?s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.

Don?t be afraid to learn.

Knowledge is weightless,a treasure you can always carry easily.

Don?t use time or words carelessly.

Neither can be retrieved.

Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way.

Yesterday is history, Tomorrow is a mystery and Today is a gift:

that?s why we call it “The Present”.

Passage 27. The Road to Success

It is well that young men should begin at the beginning

and occupy the most subordinate positions.

Many of the leading businessmen of Pittsburgh had a serious responsibility

thrust upon them at the very threshold of their career.

They were introduced to the broom,

and spent the first hours of their business lives sweeping out the office.

I notice we have janitors and janitresses now in offices,

and our young men unfortunately miss that salutary branch of a business education.

But if by chance the professional sweeper is absent any morning,

the

boy

who

has

the

genius

of

the

future

partner

in him

will

not

hesitate

to

try

his

hand

at

the

broom.

It does not hurt the newest comer to sweep out the office if necessary.

I was one of those sweepers myself.

Assuming that you have all obtained employment and are fairly started,

my advice to you is “aim high.”

I would not give a fig for the young man who does not already see himself the partner

or the head of an important firm.

Do not rest content for a moment in your thoughts as head clerk,

or foreman, or general manager in any concern, no matter how extensive.

Say to yourself,“My place is at the top.”

Be king in your dreams.

And here is the prime condition of success,the great secret:

concentrate your energy,thought, and capital exclusively upon the business

in which you are engaged.

Having begun in one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it,

adopt every improvement,have the best machinery, and know the most about it.

The concerns which fail are those which have scattered their capital,

which means that they have scattered their brains also.

They have investments in this, or that, or the other,here, there, and everywhere.

“

Don?t put all your eggs in one basket” is all wrong.

I tell you “put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.”

It is easy to watch and carry the one basket.

He who carries three baskets must put one on his head,

which is apt to tumble and trip him up.

One fault of the American businessmen is lack of concentration.

Passage 28. A Divided House Cannot Stand

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending,

we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.

We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object

and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation.

Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased,

but has constantly augmented.

In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.

“

A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved;

I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it,

and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that

it is in the course of ultimate extinction,

or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States,

old as well as new, North as well as South.

Have we no tendency to the latter condition?

Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination

—

piece

of

machinery,so

to

speak

—

compounded

of

the

Nebraska

doctrine

and

the

Dred

Scott

decision.

Let him consider, not only what work the machinery is adapted to do,

and how well adapted, but also let him study the history of its construction,and trace,

if he can, or rather fail, if he can, to trace the evidences of design

and concert of action

Passage 29. Alone Again, Naturally

Alone, we squander life by rejecting its full potential

and wasting its remaining promises.

Alone, we accept that experiences unshared are barely worthwhile,

that sunsets viewed singly are not as spectacular,

that time spent apart is fallow and pointless.

And so we grow old believing we are nothing by ourselves,

steadfastly shunning the opportunities for self-discovery

and personal growth that solitude could bring us.

We?ve even coined a word for those who prefer to be by themselves:

antisocial, as if they were enemies of society.

They are viewed as friendless, suspect in a world that goes around in twos or more

and is wary of solitary travelers.

People who need people are threatened by people who don?t.

The idea of seeking contentment alone is heretical,

for society steadfastly decrees that our completeness lies in others.

Instead, we cling to each other for solace, comfort,and safety,

believing that we are nothing alone

—

insignificant, unfulfilled, lost

—

accepting solitude in the tiniest, most reluctant of slices, if at all,

which is tragic, for it rejects God

?

s precious gift of life.

Ironically, most of us crave more intimacy and companionship than we can bear.

We begrudge ourselves,our spouses,

and our partners sufficient physical and emotional breathing room,

and then bemoan the suffocation of our relationships.

To point out these facts is not to suggest we should abandon all our close ties.

Medical surveys show that the majority of elderly people who live alone,

yet maintain frequent contact with relatives and friends,

rate their physical and emotional well-

being as “excellent.”

Just as an apple a day kept the doctor away when they were young,

an active social calendar appears to serve the same purpose now.

Passage 30. The Blue Days

Everybody has blue days.

These are miserable days when you feel lousy, grumpy, lonely, and utterly exhausted.

Days when you feel small and insignificant, when everything seems just out of reach.

You can?t rise to the occasion.

Just getting started seems impossible.

On blue days you can become paranoid that everyone is out to get you.

This is not always such a bad thing.

You feel frustrated and anxious, which can induce a nail-biting frenzy

that can escalate into a triple- chocolate-mud-cake-eating frenzy in a blink of an eye!

On blue days y

ou feel like you?re floating in an ocean of sadness.

You?re about to burst into tears at any moment and you don?t even know why.

Ultimately, you feel like you?re wandering through life without purpose.

You?re not sure how much longer you can hang on, and y

ou feel like shouting,

“

Will someone please shoot me!”

It doesn?t take much to bring on a blue day.

You might just wake up not feeling or looking your best,

find some new wrinkles, put on a little weight, or get a huge pimple on your nose.

You could forget

your date?s name or have an embarrassing photograph published.

You might get dumped,divorced, or fired, make a fool of yourself in public,

be afflicted with a demeaning nickname,or just have a plain old bad-hair day.

Maybe work is a pain in the butt.

You?re under major pressure to fill someone else?s shoes,

your boss is picking on you, and everyone in the office is driving you crazy.

You might have a splitting headache,or a slipped dish, bad breath, a toothache,

chronic gas, dry lips, or a nasty ingrown toenail.

Whatever the reason, you?re convinced that someone up there doesn?t like you.

Oh what to do, what to dooo?

Passage 31. Choose Optimism

If you expect something to turn out badly, it probably will.

Pessimism is seldom disappointed.

But the same principle also works in reverse.

If you expect good things to happen, they usually do!

There seems to be a natural cause-and- effect relationship between optimism and success.

Optimism and pessimism are both powerful forces,

and each of us must choose which we want to shape our outlook and our expectations.

There is enough good and bad in everyone?s life—

ample sorrow and happiness,

sufficient joy and pain

—

to find a rational basis for either optimism or pessimism.

We can choose to laugh or cry, bless or curse.

It?

s our decision: From which perspective do we want to view life?

Will we look up in hope or down in despair?

I believe in the upward look.

I choose to highlight the positive and slip right over the negative.

I am an optimist by choice as much as by nature.

Sure, I know that sorrow exists.

I am in my 70s now, and I?ve lived through more than one crisis.

But when all is said and done, I find that the good in life far outweighs the bad.

An optimistic attitude is not a luxury; it?s a necessity.

The way you look at life will determine how you feel, how you perform,

and how well you will get along with other people.

Conversely, negative thoughts, attitudes,and expectations feed on themselves;

they become a self- fulfilling prophecy.

Pessimism creates a dismal place where no one wants to live.

The only thing more powerful than negativism is a positive affirmation,

a word of optimism and hope.

One of the things I am most thankful for is the fact that

I have grown up in a nation with a grand tradition of optimism.

When a whole culture adopts an upward look, incredible things can be accomplished.

When the world is seen as a hopeful, positive place,

people are empowered to attempt and to achieve.

Passage 32. Why Should We Live with Such Hurry

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?

We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

Men say that a stitch in time saves nine,

and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.

As for work, we haven?t any of any consequence.

We have the Saint Vitus

’

dance

，

and cannot possibly keep our heads still.

If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bellrope, as for a fire,

that is,without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm

in the outskirts of Concord,notwithstanding that press of engagements

which was his excuse so many times this morning,nor a boy, nor a woman,

I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound,

not mainly to save property from the flames,but,

if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must,

and we, be it known, did not set it on fire

—

or to see it put out,

and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely;

yes, even if it were the parish church itself.

Hardly a man takes a half-

hour?s nap after dinner,

but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks,

“

What?s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.

Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose;

and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed.

After a night?s sleep

the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.

“

Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe”,

—

and he reads it over his coffee and rolls,

that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River;

never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world,

and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

Passage 33. A Woman’s Tears

“

Why are you crying?” he asked his Mom.

“

Because I?m a woman.” she told him.

“

I don?t understand,” he said

.

His Mom just hugged him and said, “And you never will ... ”

Later the little boy asked his father, “Why does mother seem to cry for no reason?”

“

All women cry for no reason.” was all his Dad could say.

The little boy grew up and became a man, still wondering why women cry.

Finally he put in a call to God;

when God got on the phone, the man said, “God, why do women cry so easily?”

God said,“When I made woman she had to be special.

I made her shoulders strong enough to carry the weight of the world;

yet gentle enough to give comfort.

I gave her an inner strength to endure childbirth

and the rejection that many times comes from her children.

I gave her a hardness that allows her to keep going when everyone else gives up

and take care of her family through fatigue and sickness without complaining.

I gave her the sensitivity to love her children under any and all circumstances,

even when her child has hurt them very badly.

I gave her strength to carry her husband through his faults

and fashioned her from his rib to protect his heart.

I gave her wisdom to know that a good husband never hurts his wife,

but sometimes tests her strengths and her resolve to stand beside him unfalteringly.

I gave her a tear to shed.

It?s hers exclusively to use whenever it is needed.

I

t?s her only weakness.

It

’

s a tear for mankind.

”

Passage 34. Laziness

Laziness is a sin: everyone knows that.

We have probably all had lectures pointing out that laziness is immoral,

that it is wasteful, and that lazy people will never amount to anything in life.

But laziness can be more harmful than that,

and it is often caused by more complex reasons than the simple wish to avoid work.

Some people who appear to be lazy are suffering from much more serious problems.

They may be so distrustful of their fellow workers

that they are unable to join in any group task for fear of being laughed at

or fear of having their ideas stolen.

These people who seem lazy may be deadened by a fear of failure

that prevents fruitful work.

Or other sorts of fantasies may prevent work:

some people are so busy planning,

sometimes planning great deals of fantastic achievements,

that they are unable to deal with whatever“lesser” work is on hand.

Still other people are not avoiding work,strictly speaking;

they are nearly procrastinating

—

rescheduling their day.

Laziness can actually be helpful.

Like procrastinators,some people look lazy when they are really thinking,

planning,researching.

We should all remember that some great scientific discoverise occurred by chance.

Newton wasn?t w

orking in the orchard when the apple hit him

and he devised the theory of gravity.

All of us would like to have someone “lazy” build the car or stove we buy,

particularly if that “laziness”

—

were caused by the worker?s taking time to check each step of his

work

and to do his job right.

And sometimes,being “lazy”, that is,

taking time off for a rest is good for the overworked students or executive.

Taking a rest can be particularly helpful to the athlete who is trying too hard

or the doctor who?s simply work

ing himself overtime too many evenings at the clinic.

So be careful when you?re tempted to call someone lazy.

That person may be thinking,

resting or planning his or her next book.

Passage 35. Owning Books

We enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed.

A borrowed book is like a guest in the house;

it must be treated with punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality.

You must see that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof.

But your own books belong to you;

you treat them with that affectionate intimacy that annihilates formality.

Books are for use, not for show;

you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up,

or afraid to place on the table, wide open and face down.

A good reason for marking favorite passages in books

is that this practice enables you to remember more easily the significant sayings,

to refer to them quickly, and then in later years,

it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail.

Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth;

the instinct of private property can here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils.

The best of mural decorations is books;

they are more varied in color and appearance than any wallpaper,

they are more attractive in design,

and they have the prime advantage of being separate personalities,

so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight,

you are surrounded with intimate friends.

The knowledge that they are there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing.

Books are of the people, by the people, for the people.

Literature is the immortal part of history;

it is the best and most enduring part of personality.

Book- friends have this advantage over living friends;

you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society in the world whenever you want it.

The great dead are beyond our physical reach,

and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible.

But in a private library,

you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens.

And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best.

They

to make a favorable impression.

You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor;

only instead of seeing them masked,

you look into their innermost heart of heart.

Passage 36. Olympic Games

In ancient Greece athletic festivals were very important

and had strong religious associations.

The Olympian athletic festival held every four years in honor of Zeus,

king of the Olympian Gods, eventually lost its local character,

became first a national event and then,

after the rules against foreign competitors had been abolished, international.

No one knows exactly how far back the Olympic Games go,

but some official records date from 776B.C.

The games took place in August on the plain by Mount Olympus.

Many thousands of spectators gathered from all parts of Greece,

but no married woman was admitted even as a spectator.

Slaves, women and dishonored persons were not allowed to compete.

The exact sequence of events is uncertain,

but events included boy?s gymnastics, boxing, wrestling, horse racing and field events,

though there were fewer sports involved than in the modern Olympic Games.

On the last day of the Games,

all the winners were honored by having a ring of holy olive leaves placed on their heads.

So great was the honor that the winner of the foot race

gave his name to the year of his victory.

Although Olympic winners received no prize money,

they were, in fact, richly rewarded by their state authorities.

How their results compared with modern standards,

we unfortunately have no means of telling.

After an uninterrupted history of almost 1,200 years,

the Games were suspended by the Romans in 394 A.D.

They continued for such a long time

because people believed in the philosophy behind the Olympics:

the idea that a healthy body produced a healthy mind,

and

that

the

spirit

of

competition

in

sports

and

games

was

preferable

to

the

competition

that

caused wars.

It was over 1,500 years before another such international athletic gathering took place in Athens in

1896.

Nowadays,the Games are held in different countries in turn.

The host country provides vast facilities,

including a stadium, swimming pools and living accommodation,

but competing countries pay their own athletes? expenses.

Passage 37. Life Lessons

Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away

that they were meant to be there,

to serve some sort of purpose,teach you a lesson,

or to help you figure out who you are or who you want to become.

You never know who these people may be

—

a roommate, a neighbor, a professor, a friend, a lover, or even a complete stranger

—

but when you lock eyes with them,

you know at that very moment they will affect your life in some profound way.

Sometimes things happen to you that may seem horrible,painful, and unfair at first,

but in reflection you find that without overcoming those obstacles

you would have never realized your potential, strength,willpower, or heart.

Everything happens for a reason.

Nothing happens by chance or by means of good or bad luck.

Illness,injury, love, lost moments of true greatness,

and sheer stupidity all occur to test the limits of your soul.

Without these small tests, whatever they may be,

life would be like a smoothly paved straight flat road to nowhere.

It would be safe and comfortable,but dull and utterly pointless.

The people you meet who affect your life,

and the success and downfalls you experience,

help to create who you are and who you become.

Even the bad experiences can be learned from.

In fact, they are sometimes the most important ones.

If someone loves you, give love back to them in whatever way you can,

not only because they love you, but because in a way,

they are teaching you to love and how to open your heart and eyes to things.

If someone hurts you, betrays you, or breaks your heart,forgive them,

for they have helped you learn about trust

and the importance of being cautious to whom you open your heart.

Make every day count.

Appreciate every moment and take from those moments everything that you possibly can

for you may never be able to experience it again.

Talk to people that you have never talked to before,

and listen to what they have to say.

Let yourself fall in love, break free, and set your sights high.

Hold your head up because you have every right to.

Tell yourself you are a great individual and believe in yourself,

for if you don?t believe in yourself,

it will be hard for others to believe in you.

Passage 38. Rain of Seattle I

I?ve got a deep secret few people understand and even fewer will admit to sharing.

It?s time to tell the truth:

I love the rain, deeply and passionately and more than the sun.

At least I live in the right place,

famous for its damp weather and spawning its own genuine rainforest.

I can?t imagine living anywhere else than the Pacific Northwest.

The sun shines so infrequently that my friends forget where they put their sunglasses.

Gloomy clouds cause many people around here to suffer from seasonal affective disorder.

Yet I welcome the rain.

Seattleites will say they like how rain keeps the city green,

how clean the air tastes afterwards.

My real reason for enjoying the rain is steeped in pure selfishness

when it?s mucky outside,

I don?t have to do anyt

hing.

I can spend the afternoon curled up reading,

build a fire and make a big pot of spiced tea.

I can sleep in late, waking up occasionally to hear soothing patter on the roof,

water racing down the gutter.

Nobody expects me to leave my house or do anything overly productive.

Maybe I?ll invite a few friends over to watch an old movie or play a board game.

Friends

?

expectations are low and easy to meet.

Summer in Seattle is beautiful but exhausting.

The sunny, gorgeous weather and blue skies draw Seattleites from their cozy little homes,

ready to dry out and have fun.

People go hiking, biking, canoeing.

Folks work in their gardens, wash their cars

and attend outdoor concerts in the park all in the same day!

The effort involved to throw a party ratchets up several notches,

as people host barbecues and picnics and water-skiing parties.

Passage 39. Rain of Seattle II

It?s a sin around here to not thoroughly enjoy every moment of every golden day.

It?s embarrassing to answer,

“

Did you get out and enjoy the sunshi

ne this weekend?” with “No, I stayed inside.”

Co-workers frown and exchange suspicious looks;

apparently I?m one of those rain

-loving slugs.

I tried lying, but my pale complexion gave me away.

Another mark in rain?s favor is that my body doesn?t betray me when it?s cold and damp outside.

Throughout the winter,people wear several layers,

with perhaps several extra pounds here and there.

In June I dig out my shorts to discover my thighs resemble cottage cheese.

I dread buying a swimsuit,

as consecutive horror and humiliation make me cringe in the dressing room.

Even my tastebuds prefer the rain.

When it storms outside, it?s time for steamy hot chocolate or even a soothing toddy.

People devour hot, hearty meals, with lots of potatoes and savory sauces.

This type of eating evaporates when the sun comes out;

suddenly everyone offers salads and ice water and expects it to be satisfying.

It?s time to publicly acknowledge that I love the rain.

How

it

transforms

my

house

into

a

cozy

cave

where

I

can

spend

the

afternoon

cooking

and

dreaming.

It seems nobody else will admit to a love affair with the rain,

nobody else will groan when it?s hot outside and join me in a rain dance.

When the sun comes out I do greet it with a smile,

slipping sunglasses to my purse and pulling a tank top out of my closet.

Yet my comfortable sweaters and warm slippers beckon,

making me wish for another wet, chilly afternoon.

When the rain returns, I will grin even more.

Am I the only one?

Passage 41. The 50-Percent Theory of Life

I believe in the 50-percent theory.

Half the time things are better than normal; the other half, they are worse.

I believe life is a pendulum swing.

It takes time and experience to understand what normal is,

and that gives me the perspective to deal with the surprises of the future.

Let?s benchmark the parameters: Yes, I will die.

I?ve dealt with the deaths of both parents, a best friend, a beloved boss and cherished pets.

Some of these deaths have been violent, before my eyes, or slow and agonizing.

Bad stuff, and it belongs at the bottom of the scale.

Then there are those high points: romance and marriage to the right person;

having a child and doing those Dad things like coaching my son?s baseball team,

paddling around the creek in the boat while he?s swimming with the

dogs;

discovering his compassion so deep it manifests even in his kindness to snails,

his imagination so vivid he builds a spaceship from a scattered pile of Legos.

But

there

is

a

vast

meadow

of

life

in

the

middle,

where

the

bad

and

the

good

flip-flop

acrobatically.

This is what convinces me to believe in the 50-percent theory.

One spring I planted corn too early in a bottomland so flood- prone that neighbors laughed.

I felt chagrined at the wasted effort.

Summer turned brutal

—

the worst heat wave and drought in my lifetime.

The air-conditioner died, the well went dry, the marriage ended, the job lost, the money gone.

I was living lyrics from a country tune

—

music I loathed.

Only a surging Kansas City Royals team, bound for their first World Series, buoyed my spirits.

Looking back on that horrible summer,

I soon understood that all succeeding good things merely offset the bad.

Worse than normal wouldn?t last long.

I am owed and savor the halcyon times.

They reinvigorate me for the next nasty surprise and offer assurance that I can thrive.

The 50-

percent theory even helps me see hope beyond my Royals? recent slump,

a field of struggling rookies sown so that some year soon we can reap an October harvest.

Passage 42. The Road to Happiness

If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy,

you will see that they all have certain things in common.

The most important of these things is an activity which at most gradually builds up something

that you are glad to see coming into existence.

Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children

can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family.

Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way

if their own work seems good to them.

But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure.

Many men who spend their working life in the city

devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in their gardens,

and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty.

The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion,been treated too solemnly.

It had been thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion.

Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory

may need a better theory to help them to recovery,

just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill.

But when things are normal a man should be healthy without a tonic

and happy without a theory.

It is the simple things that really matter.

If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work,

and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn,

he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be.

If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his children?s noise unendurable,

and the office a nightmare;

if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day,

then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen

—

a different diet, or more exercise, or what not.

Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think.

This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it.

Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced,would increase their happiness more

by walking six miles every day

than by any conceivable change of philosophy.

Passage 43. Two Views of the River

Now when I had mastered the language of this water,

and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river

as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet,

I had made a valuable acquisition.

But I had lost something, too.

I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived.

All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed

when steamboating was new to me.

A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood;

in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold,

through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous;

in one place, a long slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water;

in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings,

that were as many-tinted as an opal;

where the ruddy flush was faintest,

was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines,

ever so delicately traced;

the shore on our left was densely wooded,

and the somber shadow that fell from this forest

was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver;

and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough

that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun.

There were graceful curves,reflected images, woody heights,soft distances;

and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily,

enriching it every passing moment with new marvels of coloring.

Passage 44. How Germans See Others

The Germans generally adore England and have suffered in the past from unrequited love.

England used to be the ultimate role model with its amazingly advanced political,

social, industrial and technological achievements.

The Germans regard the English as being very nice and mostly harmless,almost German.

They admire Americans for the (un-German) easygoing pragmatism

and dislike them for their (un-German) superficiality.

For the Germans,the United States is the headmaster in the school of nations,

and accord due respect if not always affection.

Germans are strong believers in authority.

If you know how to obey, then you can also be a master runs the refrain.

With the Italian Germans have a close understanding

because they have so much history in common.

Through wars, invasion and other forms of tourism,

a deep and lasting friendship has been established.

Italian art treasures, food and beaches are thoroughly appreciated.

There is also a connection arising from the fact that

Italy and Germany both achieved nationhood in the last century,

and are still not entirely sure that this was a good thing.

The French are admired for their sophisticated civilization,

and pitied for their inferior culture.

The French may have higher spirits, but the Germans have deeper souls.

Despite this, Francophilia is widespread among Germans,

especially those living close to the French border.

Like a wistful child looking over the garden fence,

Germans

envy

Mediterranean

people

for

more

relaxed

attitudes,

cultural

heritage

and

warm

climate.

But only when they are on holiday.

The only people to whom the Germans readily concede

unquestioned superiority of Teutonic virtues are the Swiss.

No German would argue their supremacy in the fields of order,

punctuality,diligence, cleanliness and thoroughness.

They have never been to war with the Swiss.

If experience has taught them one thing,

it is that there is not future outside the community of nations.

No other nation has a stronger sense of the importance of getting along with others.

Tolerance is not only a virtue,

It?s a duty.

Passage 45. Napoleon to Josephine

I have your letter, my adorable love.

It has filled my heart with joy.

Since I left you I have been sad all the time.

My only happiness is near you.

I go over endlessly in my thought of your kisses,your tears, your delicious jealousy.

The charm of my wonderful Josephine kindles a living,

blazing fire in my heart and senses.

When shall I be able to pass every minute near you,

with nothing to do but to love you

and nothing to think of but the pleasure of telling you of it and giving you proof of it?

I loved you some time ago; since then I feel that I love you a thousand times better.

Ever since I have known you I adore you more every day.

That proves how wrong is that saying of La Bruy

ere “Love comes all of a sudden.”

Ah, let me see some of your faults;

be less beautiful,less graceful, less tender,less good.

But never be jealous and never shed tears.

Your tears send me out of my mind... they set my very blood on fire.

Believe me that it is utterly impossible for me to have a single thought that is not yours,

a single fancy that is not submissive to your will.

Rest well. Restore your health.

Come back to me and then at any rate before we die we ought to be able to say:

“

We were happy for

so very many days!”

Millions of kisses even to your dog.

Passage 46 When Heaven and Earth Kiss

For my money, a good sunset is the cheapest shot of wonder out there.

Think of it

—

bursts of incandescent energy that can curl your toes,

warm your soul, and prove cost effective all at the same time.

The iciest hearts on the planet can be thawed by the heaven?s burnished flame.

Countries sitting down for peace talks ought to begin

with a joint viewing of rose-dipped hues and golden halos

merging into growing flowers of light.

And for romance, this daily dose of celestial seduction

is just what the love doctor ordered.

When first meeting the incredible woman who is now my wife,

I quickly caught what Bonnie was about when I asked the age-worn question,

“

So, what do

you do?”

“

I chase sunsets,” she replied. I was a goner.

I?m not sure if that was the exact moment when I fell in love,

but it was, at least, the start of my descent.

Cut to our honeymoon and one of my favorite settings in the world

—

Ireland, the Emerald Isle.

One day we were traveling from the city of Galway toward the Ring of Kerry.

Late in the afternoon we discovered that a boat up ahead

could ferry us across a tributary and save some four hours? driving time.

I made for the last launch, a mere ten minutes and eighteen kilometers away.

With luck, and no livestock crossings, we would just make it.

All of a sudden Bonnie called out, “Stop!”

Dutifully, I pulled over.

Bonnie pointed to the sky.

It was the sunset.

Not just any sunset.

This clearly was a masterpiece.

Getting out, we drank deep of a heavenly show of amber and golden hues,

rose finger clouds painting the broad canvas of sky.

The bridge would wait another day.

The Ring of Kerry wasn?t going anywhere.

Bonnie and I inhaled the magnificent sunset like ambrosia.

Sunsets, and sunrises for that matter, are gifts served up in plentiful procession.

It?s one of life?s ways of taking a simple pause, marking the day.

If we?re too busy, caught in the whirlwind of our own manufacturing, we miss the magic.

What is required in order to drink the heady miracle of morning or evening light

is a consciousness of how we use the time allotted to us each day.

Pausing for a moment, we willingly open our spirits to the gifts of the universe.

These are indeed the gifts that help make life this good.

Passage 47 Disrupting My Comfort Zone

I was 45 years old when I decided to learn how to surf.

They say that life is tough enough.

But I guess I like to make things difficult on myself, because I do that all the time.

Every day and on purpose.

That's because I believe in disrupting my comfort zone.

When I started out in the entertainment business,

I made a list of people that I thought would be good to me.

Not people who could give me a job or a deal,

but people who could shake me up, teach me something, challenge my ideas about myself and the

world.

So I started calling up experts in all kinds of fields.

Some of them were world-famous.

Of course, I didn't know any of these people and none of them knew me.

So when I called these people up to ask them for a meeting,

the response wasn't always friendly.

And even when they agreed to give me some of their time,

the results weren't always what one might describe as pleasant.

Take, for example, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.

It took me a year of begging and more begging to get to him to agree to meet with me.

And then what happened? He ridiculed me and insulted me.

But that was okay.

I was hoping to learn something from him

—

and I did,

even if it was only that I'm not that interesting to a physicist with no taste for our pop culture.

Over the last 30 years, I've produced more than 50 movies and 20 television series.

I'm successful and, in my business, pretty well known.

So why do I continue to subject myself to this sort of thing?

The answer is simple:

Disrupting my comfort zone, bombarding myself with challenging people and situations

—

this is the best way that I know to keep growing.

And to paraphrase a biologist I once met,

if you're not growing, you're dying.

So maybe I'm not the best surfer on the north shore, but that's okay.

The discomfort, the uncertainty, the physical and mental challenge that I get from this

—

all the things that too many of us spend our time and energy trying to avoid

—

they are precisely the things that keep me in the game.

Passage 48 The One Way to Become an Artist

Pupils in all the schools in this country are now exposed to all kinds of temptations

which blunt their feelings.

I constantly feel discouraged in addressing them

because I know not how to tell them boldly what they ought to do,

when I feel how practically difficult it is for them to do it.

If you paint as you ought, and study as you ought,

depend upon it the public will take no notice of you for a long while.

If you study wrongly, and try to draw the attention of the public upon you,

—

supposing you to be clever students

—

you will get swift reward;

but the reward does not come fast when it is sought wisely;

it is always held aloof for a little while;

the right roads of early life are very quiet ones,

hedged in from nearly all help or praise.

But the wrong roads are noisy,

—

vociferous everywhere with all kinds of demand upon you for art

which is not properly art at all;

and in the various meetings of modern interests, money is to be made in every way;

but art is to be followed only in one way.

Our Schools of Art are confused by the various teaching and various interests

that are now abroad among us.

Everybody is talking about art, and writing about it, and more or less interested in it;

everybody wants art, and there is not art for everybody,

and few who talk know what they are talking about;

thus students are led in all variable ways,

while there is only one way in which they can make steady progress,

for true art is always and will be always one.

Whatever changes may be made in the customs of society,

whatever new machines we may invent, whatever new manufactures we may supply,

Fine Art must remain what it was two thousand years ago, in the days of Phidias;

two thousand years hence, it will be, in all its principles,

and in all its great effects upon the mind of man, just the same.

Observe this that I say, please, carefully, for I mean it to the very utmost.

There is but one right way of doing any given thing required of an artist;

there may be a hundred wrong, deficient, or mannered ways,

but there is only one complete and right way.

Passage 49 Book and Life

Books are to mankind what memory is to the individual.

They contain the history of our race, the discoveries we have made,

the accumulated knowledge and experience of ages;

they picture for us the miracles and beauties of nature, help us in our difficulties,

comfort us in sorrow and in suffering, change hours of weariness into moments of delight,

store our minds with ideas, fill them with good and happy thoughts,

and lift us out of and above ourselves.

Many of those who have had, as we say, all that this world can give,

have yet told us they owed much of their purest happiness to books.

Macaulay had wealth and fame, rank and power,

and yet he tells us in his biography that he owed the happiest hours of his life to books.

He says, “If any one would make me the greatest king that ever lived,

with palaces and gardens and fine dinners, and wines and coaches, and beautiful clothes,

and hundreds of servants, on condition that I should not read books,

I would not be a king;

I

would

rather

be

a

poor

man

in

a

garret

with

plenty

of

books

than

a

king

who

didn?t

love

reading.”

Precious and priceless are the blessings which the books scatter around our daily paths.

We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits,

through the most solemn and charming regions.

Without stirring from our firesides we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth,

or soar into realms when Spenser's shapes of unearthly beauty flock to meet us,

where Milton's angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise.

Science, art, literature, philosophy,

—

all that man has thought, all that man has done,

—

the experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations,

—

all are garnered up for us in the world of books.

Passage 50 Snow and the Passage of Time

Any snowfall which brings traffic to a standstill

and closes schools takes me back to one particular storm in my youth on the shores of Lake Area.

On that day, schools and stores were closed because of the weather.

What resonates for me is a six-block walk I took with my father from our house to the post office.

He bought me stamps for my recently started stamp collection.

I already had a wild assortment of cancelled stamps from around the world.

He brought me brand-new stamps.

I can retrace the route in my mind, walking on snow-covered sidewalks and streets.

It was unusual to be going for a walk with my father on a weekday and so close to home.

In the following years, I never talked about that walk with him,

I never even thought about it until it appeared to me about a decade ago.

A winter memory now returned to the forefront.

The elderly are said to be in the winter of their lives,

and winter is synonymous with the end of life.

That does not make the winter the Grim Reaper; rather,

it is a time of reflection

in those for whom childhood is long gone.

My father died in the summer of 1997.

For me, his final months resembled the patterns of settling in for winter,

a turning inward and slowing down.

In the end, his breath grew shallower until there was just the quiet.

There are emotional powers that accompany the season,

a blanket of white ties the landscape into a continuous and undulating hall.

The curve of hillsides in the foundations of houses all is connected.

The season keeps us indoors.

Our thoughts and feelings turn inward.

I'm visiting Southern California as I write this,

a place where winter expresses itself as rain.

It would be easy to live in a climate where there are no freezing temperatures snow,

but I would still define the shape of the year by winter

as I knew it from my childhood.

Passage 51. Sorrow of the Millionaire

The unfortunate millionaire has the responsibility of tremendous wealth

without the possibility of enjoying himself more than any ordinary rich man.

Indeed, in many things he cannot enjoy himself more than many poor men do,

nor even so much, for a drum major is better dressed,

a trainer?s stable lad often rides a better horse;

the first- class carriage is shared by office boys taking their young ladies out for the evening;

everybody who goes down to Brighton for Sunday rides in the Pullman car;

and for what use is it to be able to pay for a peacock?s brain sandwich

when there is nothing to be had but ham or beef?

The injustice of this state of things has not been sufficiently considered.

A man with an income of

￡

25 a year can multiply his comfort beyond all calculation

by doubling his income.

A man with

￡

50 a year can at least quadruple his comfort by doubling his income.

Probably up to even

￡

250 a year doubled income means doubled comfort.

After that the increment of comfort grows less in proportion to the increment of income

until

a

point

is

reached

at

which

the

victim

is

satiated

and

even

surfeited

with

everything

that

money can purchase.

To expect him to enjoy another hundred thousand pounds because men like money,

is exactly as if you were to expect a confectioner?s shopboy

to enjoy two hours more work a day because boys are fond of sweets.

What can the wretched millionaire do that needs a million?

Does he want a fleet of yachts, a Rotten Row full of carriages, an army of servants,

a whole city of town houses, or a continent for a game preserve?

Can he attend more than one theatre in one-evening,

or wear more than one suit at a time, or digest more meals than his butler?

And yet there is no sympathy for this hidden sorrow of plutocracy.

The poor alone are pitied.

Societies spring up in all directions to relieve all sorts of comparatively happy people,

but no hand is stretched out to the millionaire,except to beg.

In all our dealings with him lies implicit,

the delusion that he has nothing to complain of,

and that he ought to be ashamed of rolling in wealth

whilst others are starving.