OF TRIFLES. YET once more, saith the fool, yet once, and is it not a little one? doubts; Whom shall I harm in this matter? and a little ill breedeth much good; My thoughts, are they not mine own? and they leave no mark behind them; And if God so pardoneth crime, how should these petty sins affect him ?— So he transgresseth yet again, and falleth by little and little, Till the ground crumble beneath him, and he sinketh in the gulf despairing. For there is nothing in the earth so small that it may not produce great things, And no swerving from a right line, that may not lead eternally astray. difference; And the cairn is heaped high by each one flinging a pebble: The dangerous bar in the harbour's mouth is only grains of sand; And the shoal that hath wrecked a navy is the work of a colony of worms: Yea, and a despicable gnat may madden the mighty elephant; And then conceive it possible, and then reflect on it as done, And use, by little and little, thyself to regard thyself a villain, Not long will crime be absent from the voice that doth invoke him to thy heart, And bitterly wilt thou grieve, that the buds have ripened into poison. A spark is a molecule of matter, yet may it kindle the world; For a look may work thy ruin, or a word create thy wealth: The walking this way or that, the casual stopping or hastening, Hath saved life, and destroyed it, hath cast down and built up fortunes. Commit thy trifles unto God, for to him is nothing trivial; And it is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in a trifle. All things are infinite in parts, and the moral is as the material, Neither is any thing vast, but it is compacted of atoms. Thou art wise, and shalt find comfort, if thou study thy pleasure in trifles, For slender joys, often repeated, fall as sunshine on the heart: Thou art wise, if thou beat off petty troubles, nor suffer their stinging to fret thee; Thrust not thine hand among the thorns, but with a leathern glove. Regard nothing lightly which the wisdom of Providence hath ordered; And therefore consider all things that happen unto thee or unto others. The warrior that stood against a host, may be pierced unto death by a needle ; And the saint that feareth not the fire, may perish the victim of a thought, And the cable of a furlong is lost through an ill-wrought inch. If an avalanche roll from its Alp, ye tremble at the will of Providence; Is not that will concerned when the sear leaves fall from the poplar?— A thing is great or little only to a mortal's thinking, But abstracted from the body, all things are alike important: The Ancient of Days noteth in his book the idle converse of a creature, And happy and wise is the man to whose thought existeth not a trifle. OF RECREATION. fo join advantage to amusement, to gather profit with pleasure, Is the wise man's necessary aim, when he lieth in the shade of recreation For he cannot fling aside his mind, nor bar up the floodgates of his wis dom; Yea, though he strain after folly, his mental monitor shall check him: isfaction. The soul may not safely dwell too long with the deep things of futurity; The mind may not always be bent back, like the Parthian, straining at the past: (16) And, if thou art wearied with wrestling on the broad arena of science, Leave awhile thy friendly foe, half vanquished in the dust, Refresh thy jaded limbs, return with vigour to the strife,— Thou shalt easier find thyself his master, for the vacant interval of leisure. THAT which may profit and amuse is gathered from the volume of creation, For every chapter therein teemeth with the playfulness of wisdom. The elements of all things are the same, though nature hath mixed them with a difference, And Learning delighteth to discover the affinity of seeming opposites: So out of great things and small draweth he the secrets of the universe, moor, The cayman, basking on a mud-bank, and the walrus anchored to an ice berg, The dog at his master's feet, and the milk-kine lowing in the meadow; To learn a use in the beetle, and more than a beauty in the butterfly; Each distant shining world, a kingdom for one of the redeemed; To read the antique history of earth, stamped upon those medals in the rocks, Which Design hath rescued from decay, to tell of the green infancy of time; To gather from the unconsidered shingle mottled starlike agates, Full of unstoried flowers in the bubbling bloom-chalcedony: Or gay and curious shells, fretted with microscopic carving, Corallines, and fresh seaweeds, spreading forth their delicate branches. It is an admirable lore, to learn the cause in the change, To study the chemistry of Nature, her grand, but simple secrets. In all itis wise happiness to see the well-ordained laws of Jehovah, The harmony that filleth all his mind, the justice that tempereth his bounty, The wonderful all-prevalent analogy that testifieth one Creator, |