VIEW-POINT.
In a poem, "The Mountain," Edwin Markham shows how differently a mountain affects different minds:
Each builds his world forever, dark or bright,
And sits within his separate universe.
The shepherd sees in this green mountain top
Place where his sheep may wander and grow fat.
What to the drover is this lilied pool?
A hollow for his swine to wallow in.
Gold-hunters find upon this rocky peak
Nothing but ledges for their ringing picks.
But to the poet all this soaring height
Smokes with the footsteps of the passing God!
(3399)
See Life What We Make It; Moods Determining
Desires.
View-point Changed—See Values in
Question.
Views, Contracted—See Self-limitation.
VIGILANCE
Richard III went out at twilight to reconnoiter;
he found a sentinel fast asleep at the
outposts. The King promptly stabbed him
to the heart and left upon his breast a paper
with the stern inscription, "I found him
asleep and I leave him so."
Sooner or later death, or something
equally to be feared, overtakes every
man who forsakes his duty and falls
asleep at his post. (Text.)
(3400)
Vigilance in Nature—See Nature's Aggressiveness.
VINCIBLENESS
Men are like timber. Oak will bear a
stress that pine won't, but there never was
a stick of timber on the earth that could
not be broken at some pressure. There
never was a man born on the earth that could
not be broken at some pressure—not always
the same nor put in the same place. There
is many a man who can not be broken by
money pressure, but who can be by pressure
of flattery. There is many a man impervious
to flattery who is warped and biased by his
social inclinations. There is many a man
whom you can not tempt with red gold, but
you can with dinners and convivialities. One
way or the other, every man is vincible.
There is a great deal of meaning in that
simple portion of the Lord's Prayer, "Lead
us not into temptation."—Henry Ward
Beecher.
(3401)
VIRTUE IN POOR GUISES
I believe that virtue shows quite as well
in rags and patches as she does in purple and
fine linen. I believe that she and every beautiful
object in external nature claims some
sympathy in the breast of the poorest man
who breaks his scanty loaf of daily bread.
I believe that she goes barefoot as well as
shod. I believe that she dwells rather
oftener in alleys and by-ways than she does
in courts and palaces, and that it is good,
and pleasant, and profitable to track her out,
and follow her. I believe that to lay one's
hand upon some of those rejected ones whom
the world has too long forgotten, and too
often misused, and to say to the proudest and
most thoughtless, "These creatures have the
same elements and capacities of goodness as
yourselves; they are molded in the same
form, and made of the same clay; and tho
ten times worse than you, may, in having retained
anything of their original nature
amid the trials and distresses of their condition,
be really ten times better." I believe
that to do this is to pursue a worthy and not
useless vocation.—Charles Dickens.
(3402)
VIRTUE NOT TO BE COERCED
The most temperate crowd of men I know
is in Sing Sing. There isn't a single thief
in the Raymond Street Jail. But pull down
the walls of Sing Sing, and then you will
discover the difference between a man whose
virtue depends upon a wall and the man
whose goodness depends upon a will.—N. D.
Hillis.
(3403)
VIRTUE, TIRING OF
We have come to a time when multitudes
are tired of law, and duty, honor, justice,
and the old solid and substantial virtues of
the fathers. Now and then this rebellious
mood voices itself in the lips of some restless
youth who exclaims boldly, "I hate the
very word duty." Men are become like the
cattle in the clover-field, that once the appetite
is satisfied, tire of walking around knee-deep
in rich, luscious grasses, and stick their
heads through the fence, to strain toward the
dog's kennel in the dusty lane. It is a singular
fact that a colt in the field, up to its
ears in clover, as soon as it has eaten and
