to Sir Henry Irving, her old comrade on the stage, as he lay ill. "Do you ever think, as I do sometimes, what have you got out of life?" asked Miss Terry. "What have I got out of it?" said Irving, stroking his chin and smiling slightly, "Let me see—well, a good cigar, a good glass of wine, good friends."
And that summary satisfies many another.
The pathetic futility of it all!
Material things vanish, and then what
remains? Life should be more rewarding
than this. (Text.)
(1820)
LIFE, VENERATION FOR
Powhatan Bouldin's "Home Reminiscences" has a story which shows John Randolph's peculiar veneration for growing things. The incident is related by a friend of Randolph's nephew:
When I was a boy I visited at Roanoke.
The house was completely environed by
trees and underwood, and seemed to be in
a dense virgin forest. Mr. Randolph would
not permit even a switch to be cut near the
house.
Without being aware of this, one day I committed a serious trespass. My friend Tudor and I were roving about, when I, perceiving a straight young hickory about an inch thick, felled it. Tudor said that his uncle would be very angry, so I immediately went and informed him what I had ignorantly done, and exprest my regret. Mr. Randolph took the stick and looked pensively at it as if commiserating its fate. Then, gazing at me, he said:
"I would not have done this for fifty Spanish-milled dollars!"
I had seventy-five cents and had entertained some idea of offering it, but when I heard about the fifty dollars I was afraid of insulting him by such meager compensation.
"Did you want this for a cane?" asked Mr. Randolph. "No, sir." "No, you are not old enough to need a cane. Did you want it for any particular purpose?" "No, sir. I only saw that it was a pretty stick and thought I'd cut it." "We can be justified in taking animal life to furnish food or to remove a hurtful object. We can not be justified in taking even vegetable life without some useful object in view. Now, God Almighty planted this thing, and you have killed it without any adequate object. It would have grown into a large nut-tree and furnished food for many squirrels. I hope and believe you will never do so again." "Never, sir, never!" I cried.
He put the stick into a corner, and I escaped to Tudor. It was some time before I could cut a switch or fishing-rod without feeling I was doing some sort of violence to the vegetable kingdom.
(1821)
Life versus Business—See Religion versus Business.
LIFE VERSUS CHURCH
The manner in which Wesley by his zeal was pushed outside of the Church of England limits is told thus by the Rev. W. H. Fitchett:
But these two features of that work—open-air
preaching and the itinerant nature
of his ministry—determined many things.
They determined, for example, the general
question of Wesley's relation to ecclesiastical
order. For that order he had been, and still
was, a zealot; but he was slowly learning
that there were things more precious, as
well as more urgent, than mere ecclesiastical
use and wont. England was mapped out, for
example, into parishes; and were these faint
lines of ecclesiastical boundaries, drawn by
human hands and guarding fancied human
rights, to arrest such a work as Wesley was
beginning? They were like films of cobweb
drawn across a track of an earthquake!
And many an ecclesiastical cobweb of the
same kind had to be brushed aside to make
room for the new religious life beginning
to stir in Great Britain.—W. H. Fitchett,
"Wesley and His Century."
(1822)
LIFE, WASTING
Henley's brilliant epitaph on George Moreland sums up not only that artist's life, but no less the life of too many before and since:
He coined himself into guineas, and so,
like the reckless and passionate spendthrift he
was, he flung away his genius and his life
in handfuls, till nothing else was left him
but the silence and the decency of death.
(1823)
LIFE, WATER OF
The Scavatori from Naples, some years
ago, dug up from among the ruins of
Pompeii an urn of bronze filled with pure
