Items of Interest.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 440, 1 September 1904, Page 7

Items of Interest.

!T takes more grace to sympathise with joy than grief. ■n Conscience smites thee once ; it is admonition ; If twice, it is condemnation. —Cecil. The only greatness is unselfish love. . . There is a great difference between trying to please and giving pleasure.—Henry Druinmond. ' Not the good thing we accomplish, Not the hotter thing we plan ; Not the deed but the ideal Is the measure of the man.'

Walk with care 'mid human spirits, Live for blessing, not for ban ; 'Twere better never to have lived, Than lived to curse a deathless man

There are two things in every human heart which bear witness to the existence and reality of evil; first, our judgments of regret, and second, our judgments of. commendation.

The dwarf behind his steam-engine,may remove mountains, but no dwarf will hew them down with the pickaxe ; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms, —Carlyle.

Life's harmony must have its discords; but, as in music, pathos is tempered into pleasure by the pervading spirit of beauty, so are all life's sounds tempered by love.— George Henry Lewes.

Let us take care how we speak to those who have fallen in life's field. Help them up, not heap scorn upon them. We did not see the conflict. We do not know the scars.

I truly believe that nothing is permitted to enter our lives that may not in some way work together for good, although everything depends upon our trustfully accepting, and wisely using it. —Sarah P. Smiley.

Virtue, the strength and beauty of the soul, Is the best gift of heaven ; a happiness, That e'en above the smiles and frowns of fate Exalts great Nature's favourites; a wealth That ne'er encumbers, nor can be transferr'd. —Armstrong.

I esteem it an honour, not to be lightly held, that I have been permitted to recognise upon so many of earth's dusty highways the trail of an angel's robe ; to discern under homeliest disguises here a warrior and there a saint. —Marion Harland.

Certain people are always complaining of their hard lot and poverty. They go about with disaster written on their faces ; they are walking advertisements of their own failures, their own listless, nerveless, lifeless inactivity; they arc always talking, but never doing.

As daylight can be. seen through very small holes, so little things will illustrate a person's character. Indeed, character consists in little acts well and honourably performed, daily life being the quarry from which we build it up, and rough-hew the habits which form it.—Samuel Smiles.

n Patience is really the capacity for and habit of suffering. It is shown by the serenity with which we submit to the annoyance caused us by others on the one hand, and is displayed in a wider and deeper sense by the fortitude which one exhibits in all the concerns of life in good and bad fortune.

It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them, that is an advantage to us ; it being with the follies of the mind as with the weeds of a field, which, if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.—Dean Swift.

There is one proposition which the experience of life burns into my soul; it is this, that man should beware of letting his religion spoil his morality. In a thousand ways, some great, some small, but all subtle, we are daily ..tempted to that great sin. To speak such a thing seems dishonouring to God ; but it is not religion as it comes from Him, it is religion with the strange and evil mixtures which it gathers from abiding in us.—Gladstone.

A brief and lurid rocket-glare is fancy, Not even the useful gas-light on the street; Imagination is a star eternal, * For souls—yea, even for feet, I, who hatfe seen the gleam and followed guidance, Persisting past perplexity and pain, Trust, by my soul's most strenuous Godward strivings, It shall not be in vain.

Men fear death, as children fear the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by frightful tales, so is the other. Groans, convulsions, weeping friends, and the like, show death terrible ; yet there is no passion so weak but conquers the fear of it, and therefore death is not such a terrible enemy. Revenge triumphs over death, love lights it, honour aspires to it, dread of shame prefers it, grief flies ;; to it, and fear anticipates it.—Lord Bacon. And so I live you see, Go through the world, try, prove, reject, Prefer, still struggling to effect My warfare ; happy that I can Be crossed and thwarted as a man, Not left in God's contempt apart, With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, Tame in earth's paddock as her prize. —Browning.