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| Dusting, darning, drudging, nothing is great or small, / Nothing is mean or irksome: love will hallow it all. | 1 |
| Faith’s abode / Is mystery for evermore, / Its life, to worship and adore, / And meekly bow beneath the rod, / When the day is dark and the burden sore. | 2 |
| Give from below what ye get from above, / Light for the heaven-light, love for its love, / A holy soul for the Holy Dove. | 3 |
| God giveth speech to all, song to the few. | 4 |
| God has His little children out at nurse in many a home. | 5 |
| God is not found by the tests that detect you an acid or a salt. | 6 |
| Golden chains are heavy, and love is best! | 7 |
| He thought he thought, and yet he did not think, / But only echoed still the common talk, / As might an empty room. | 8 |
| Hearts grow warmer the farther you go / Up to the North with its hills and snow. | 9 |
| Hearts philanthropic at times have the trick / Of the old hearts of stone. | 10 |
| In all faiths there is something true / … Something that keeps the Unseen in view, / … And notes His gifts with the worship due. | 11 |
| It is bad, having once known the right, / And the impulse of nobleness prized, / To accept the less worthy, and order the fight / For a cause that is meaner, and walk by a light / That you once had despised. | 12 |
| It is not the loss of heritage / That makes life poor; it is that, stage by stage, / Some leave us with a lessening faith in man, / And less of love than when our life began. | 13 |
| It was a stroke / Brought the stream from the flinty rock. | 14 |
| Just a path that is sure, / Thorny or not, / And a heart honest and pure / Keeping the path that is sure, / That be my lot. | 15 |
| Just plain duty to know, / Irksome or not, / And truer and better to grow / In doing the duty I know, / That I have sought. | 16 |
| Life is no merrymaking. | 17 |
| Life is poor when its old faiths are gone, / Poorest when man can trust himself alone. | 18 |
| Life is ravelled almost ere we wot, / And with our vexing / To disentangle it, we make the knot / But more perplexing, / Embittering our lot. | 19 |
| Lose the habit of hard labour with its manliness, and then, / Comes the wreck of all you hope for in the wreck of noble men. | 20 |
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| Love likes not shallow mirth. | 21 |
| Love waits for love, though the sun be set, / And the stars come out, the dews are wet, / And the night-winds moan. | 22 |
| Man cannot live without his formulas. | 23 |
| Men must leave the ingle-nook, / And for a larger wisdom brook / Experience of a harder law, / And learn humility and awe. | 24 |
| Men will marry a fool that sings, sooner than one that has learned to scoff. | 25 |
| Must not a great history be always an epic? | 26 |
| No oath that binds to wrong can ever bind. | 27 |
| Oh, there is something in marriage like the veil of the temple of old, / That screened the Holy of Holies with blue and purple and gold; / Something that makes a chamber where none but the one may come, / A sacredness too, and a silence, where joy that is deepest is dumb. | 28 |
| Others, more aspiring than achieving, / Achieve all in suggestion,… / More helpful by their infinite reaching forth / Than all completed thinking. | 29 |
| Our works decay and disappear, / God’s frailest works abide, and look / Down on the ruins we toil to rear. | 30 |
| Paper and leather and ink, / All are but trash / If I find not the thought / Which the writer can think. | 31 |
| Pledges taken of faithless minds, / I hold them but as the idle winds / Heard and forgot. | 32 |
| Roses fair on thorns do grow: / And they tell me even so / Sorrows into virtues grow. | 33 |
| Seek but provision of bread and wine, / … Fools to flatter, and raiment fine, / … And nothing of God shall e’er be thine. | 34 |
| Shall workmen just repeat the sin of kings and conquerors? / As the nations cease from battle, shall the classes rouse the fray, / And scatter wanton sorrow for a shilling more a day? | 35 |
| She wept to feel her life so desolate, / And wept still more because the world had made it / So desolate: yet was the world her all; / She loathed it, but she knew it was her all. | 36 |
| So to living or dead let the solemn belt call; / Sleeping or waking, time passes with all. | 37 |
| Sometimes the half is better than the whole, / And sometimes worse than none; the dubious soul / Suspects the secret there in what is hid, / And holds the rest but trash. | 38 |
| The air seems nimble with the glad, / Quaint fancies of our childhood dear. | 39 |
| The art was his to break vexations with a ready jest. | 40 |
| The cloud incense of the altar hides / The true form of the God who there abides. | 41 |
| The owl sees the sunshine and winks in its nest. | 42 |
| The river has its cataract, / And yet the waters down below / Soon gather from the foam, compact, / And, just like those above it, flow. | 43 |
| The truth works sometimes from without as from within. | 44 |
| The very pain of loving is all other joys before. | 45 |
| The wealth of the land / Comes from the forge and the smithy and mine, / From hammer and chisel, and wheel and band, / And the thinking brain and the skilful hand. | 46 |
| There are omens in the air, / And voices whispering Beware!— / But never victor in the fight / Heeded the portents of fear and care. | 47 |
| There are some sorrows cannot be subjected / To man’s construction, howsoe’er suspected. | 48 |
| There are times when silence, if the preacher did but know, / Shall preach to better purpose than a sermon stale and flat. | 49 |
| They say Doubt is weak, but yet, if life be in the doubt; / The living doubt is more than Faith that life did never know. | 50 |
| They that hold by the Divine / Clasp too the Human in their faith. | 51 |
| Though He comes in many shapes, / His love is throbbing in them all, / And from His love no soul escapes, / And from His mercy none can fall. | 52 |
| Thought disturbs the world, and thought of God / Unsettles most of all; for it is life, / And only life can comprehend its force, / Or guide it. | 53 |
| To toy with human hearts is more than human hearts will brook. | 54 |
| Truth may lie in laughter, and wisdom in a jest. | 55 |
| Truth will bear / Neither rude handling, nor unfair / Evasion of its wards, and mocks / Whoever would falsely enter there. | 56 |
| Was thy life given to thee / For making pretty sentences, and play / Of dainty humour for the mirthful heart / To be more merry, or to serve thy kind, / Redressing wrong? | 57 |
| We still are fain, with wrath and strife, / To seek for gain, to shrink from loss, / Content to scratch our shallow cross / On the rough surface of old life. | 58 |
| What love hides is raised as from the dead / Some day, and kills the love which covered it, / And frankest truth is more than subtle wit. | 59 |
| What perils on a woman’s life may throng, / Sitting lonely with her thoughts, that chafe and murmur like the surf! | 60 |
| When the heart is heavy and low? / The beauty that on earth we find, / Or strain of music on the wind, / Shall touch it like an utter woe! | 61 |
| When you organise a strike, it is war you organise; / But to organise our labour were the labour of the wise. | 62 |
| Where the devil has smoothed your road, / Keep to the right like an honest man. | 63 |
| Who can do nothing of sovran worth / Which men shall praise, a higher task may find, / Plodding his dull round on the common earth, / But conquering envies rising in the mind. | 64 |
| Who could pin down a shadow to the ground, / And take its measure? | 65 |
| Who knows what Love is, may not sup / On that which is not still divine. | 66 |
| Who seeks Him in the dark and cold, / With heart that elsewhere finds no rest, / Some fringe of the skirts of God shall hold, / Though round his spirit the mists may fold, / With eerie shadows and fears untold. | 67 |
| Why should I make a shadow where God makes all so bright? | 68 |
| Why should we go a-jaunting when the heart wants to repose. | 69 |
| Women judge women hardly;… they have no shading, / No softening tints, no generous allowance / For circumstance to make the picture human, / And true because so human. | 70 |
| Women who have lost their faith / Are angels who have lost their wings. | 71 |
| Women’s sins are not alone the ills they do, / But those that they provoke you to. | 72 |
| Yet I’ve heard say, by wise men in my day, / That none are outwitted so easy as they / Who reckon with all men as if they suspect them, / And traffic in caution, and watch to detect them. | 73 |
| Yet there are surely times when there is nought / So needed as unsettling, just to get / Out of old ruts, and seek a nobler life. | 74 |
| You cannot rear a temple like a hut of sticks and turf. | 75 |
| (You may) dig the deep foundations of a long-abiding fame, / And wist not that they undermine (your) home of love and peace. | 76 |
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