Auld Lang Syne - Various

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The echoes of their prayers for health at St. Dunstan’s or St. Thomas’s Shrine, and that other shrine where the stones are worn deepest with the knees of pilgrims, but whose saint is unknown. All these echoes were awakened for my ear by the sweet chant of the boys in Canterbury Cathedral; and unreal as they were, I confess they still seem to me more real than the actual prayers for the confusion of Dr. Tait’s imaginary enemies, or the ceremony of his enthronement. To sit upon fourteen centuries and see a London gentleman in a coat so much too large for him that his friends have to hold up its skirts for him, and to see plethoric Englishmen, suggestive of sirloins, on their knees praying that the snares set for their feet shall be broken, – produced in me feelings, to say the least, of a mixed character; such as those which may have been experienced by the landlady in the Strand, when she found that her lodger Mr. Taylor (the Platonist) had sacrificed a bull to Jupiter in her back parlour. There is something not undignified in an old Greek sacrificing a heifer, laurel-crowned, to Zeus; and there is something not unimpressive in old missionaries of the Cross struggling with pagan foes, and symbolizing their faith in their vesture and in their candles which lit up the caves to which they often had to fly. But to the crowd that went down between business and business, to see so long as a return-ticket permitted this effigy of a real past, there must have been more absurdity than impressiveness in it. From the whole pageant I recall with pleasure only the long sweet chant, – a theme ensouled by genius and piety, – which, between the doorway and the altar, filled the old Cathedral and made it a vast organ, with historic tones breathing the echoes of millions of heaven-seeking pilgrims whose prayers and hymns began at that spot before the advent of Christianity, and may perhaps remain there after it has passed away.

      EXPEDIENCY

      Thus to his scholars once Confucius said:

      Better to die than not be rich: get wealth.

      He who has nothing, trust me, nothing is;

      Nay, tenfold worse than nothing.  Not to be

      Is neither good nor bad; but to be poor! —

      ’Tis to be nothing with an envious wish,

      A zero conscious of nonentity.

      To get wealth, and to keep it – this is all,

      And the one rule of life, expediency.

         This was the lesson that the master taught,

      And then he gave some rules for getting wealth:

      Happy, who once can say, I have a thing.

      All things are given us, all things to be had,

      Except, alas! the faculty of having.

      If you are sated with one dish of fruit,

      Why, no more fruit have you, to call it having,

      Though a whole Autumn lay in heaps about you.

         How to have, this, my scholars, would I teach.

      Yet who can teach it? it is great and hard.

      This one thing dare I say.  Be not deceived,

      Nor dream that those called rich have anything;

      Who think that what the pocket treasures up,

      And jealous foldings of the robe, is theirs;

      Theirs all the plate the burglar cannot reach,

      Theirs all the land they warn the traveller off:

      Fools!  Because we are poorer, are they rich?

      What is none other’s, is it therefore theirs?

         Endeavour, O my scholars, to be rich,

      Scheme to get riches when you wake from sleep,

      All day pursue them, pray for them at night.

         As when one leans long time upon his hand,

      Then, moving it, finds all its strength is gone

      And it can now grasp nothing, so the soul

      Loses in listlessness the grasping power,

      And in the midst of wealth, has nothing still.

         I know not, O my scholars, how to bring

      The tingling blood through the soul’s palsied limbs,

      But when ’tis done how rich the soul may be

      How royal in possessions, I can tell, —

      One half of wisdom – seek elsewhere the other.

      The gods divorce knowledge of good from good.

      He who is happy and rich does seldom know it,

      And he who knows the true wealth seldom has it.

         Not only all this world of eye and ear

      Becomes his house and palace of delights

      Whose soul has grasping power; so that each form

      To him becomes a picture that is his,

      The light-stream as a fountain in his court,

      The murmur of all movement music to him,

      And time’s mere lapse rhythmical in his heart.

      Not only so; a greater treasure still,

      The lives of other men, by sympathy

      Incorporated with his own, are his.

         Get wealth, my scholars, this wealth first of all.

      One life is beggary; live a thousand lives.

      In those about you live and those remote;

      Live many lives at once and call it country,

      And call it kind; in the great future live

      And make it in your life rehearse its life,

      And make the pallid past repeat its life.

      Be public-hearted and be myriad-soul’d,

      So shall you noble be as well as rich,

      And as a king watch for the general good.

      Raised to a higher level, you shall find

      With large enjoyments vast constraints, vast cares.

      Be swayed by wider interests, be touched

      By wiser instincts of the experienced heart,

      And, since all greatness is a ponderous weight,

      Be capable of vaster sufferance.

      Your joys shall be as heaven, your griefs as hell.

         Rise early, O my scholars, to be rich,

      And make Expediency your rule of life.

         Then, when the utmost scale of wealth is gain’d,

      And other lives are to your own annex’d

      By the soul’s grasping power, this guide of life,

      This sure Expediency, shall suffer change.

         When appetites shall tame to prudences

      And Prudence purge herself to Sacred Law,

      When lusts shall sweeten into sympathies,

      And royal Justice out of Anger spring,

      When the expanding Self grows infinite,

      Then shall Expediency, the guide of life,

      In Virtue die, in Virtue rise again.

       REST. 1

      Dearest Friend,

      The subject of your meeting of to-morrow is so suggestive that I would gladly join you all, and write an essay on it, if I had health and time. I have neither, and, perhaps, better so. My essay, I candidly avow, would tend to prove that no essay ought to be written on the subject. It has no reality. A sort of intuitive instinct led you to couple “Ghosts and Rest” together.

      There

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Although Mazzini was not a member of Pen and Pencil, he wrote this letter at the request of the President.