| C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917. | | | | Sprague |
| | | | The enquiring spirit will not be controll’d, |
| We would make certain all, and all behold. |
| 1 |
| | The hand is rais’d, the pledge is given, |
| One monarch to obey, one creed to own, |
| That monarch, God; that creed, His word alone. |
| 2 |
| | The news! our morning, noon and evening cry, |
| Day after day repeats it till we die. |
| For this the city, the critic, and the fop, |
| Dally the hour away in tonsor’s shop; |
| For this the gossip takes her daily route, |
| And wears your threshold and your patience out; |
| For this we leave the parson in the lurch, |
| And pause to prattle on, our way to church; |
| Even when some coffin’d friend we gather round, |
| We ask—“what news?”—then lay him in the ground. |
| 3 |
| | Through life’s dark road his sordid way he wends, |
| An incarnation of fat dividends. |
| 4 |
| | Trade hardly deems the busy day begun, |
| Till his keen eye along the sheet has run; |
| The blooming daughter throws her needle by, |
| And reads her schoolmate’s marriage with a sigh; |
| While the grave mother puts her glasses on, |
| And gives a tear to some old crony gone. |
| The preacher, too, his Sunday theme lays down, |
| To know what last new folly fills the town; |
| Lively or sad, life’s meanest, mightiest things, |
| The fate of fighting cocks, or fighting kings. |
| 5 |
| | Turn to the press—its teeming sheets survey, |
| Big with the wonders of each passing day; |
| Births, deaths, and weddings, forgeries, fires and wrecks, |
| Harangues and hailstones, brawls and broken necks. |
| 6 |
| Be purity of life the test, leave to the heart, to heaven the rest. | 7 |
| Jealousy, that doats but dooms, and murders, yet adores. | 8 | | |
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