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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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Through life’s dark road his sordid way he wends,
  • An incarnation of fat dividends.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Be purity of life the test, leave to the heart, to heaven the rest.

    Jealousy, that doats but dooms, and murders, yet adores.