The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life's Enthusiasms, by David Starr Jordan

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Title: Life's Enthusiasms

Author: David Starr Jordan

Release Date: April 7, 2004 [EBook #11939]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David A. Schwan <davidsch@earthlink.net>

Life's Enthusiasms

By

David Starr Jordan

President of Leland Stanford Junior University

Boston:

American Unitarian Association

MDCCCCVI

To Melville Best Anderson

That is poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words,
in words which are inevitable, in words which could not be changed
without weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. To
choose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chief
factor in good writing. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire help
toward doing this, instinctively automatically as other habits are
acquired. In the affairs of life, then, is no form of good manners, no
habit of usage more valuable than the habit of good English.

Life's Enthusiasms

It is the layman's privilege to take the text for his sermons
wherever he finds it. I take mine from a French novel, a cynical story
of an unpleasant person, Samuel Brohl, by Victor Cherbuliez; And this is
the text and the whole sermon:

"My son, we should lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our youth or
else we shall reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for we
lose a great many of them by the way."

And my message in its fashion shall be an appeal to enthusiasm in things
of life, a call to do things because we love them, to love things
because we do them, to keep the eyes open, the heart warm and the pulses
swift, as we move across the field of life. "To take the old world by
the hand and frolic with it;" this is Stevenson's recipe for joyousness.
Old as the world is, let it be always new to us as we are new to it. Let
it be every morning made afresh by Him who "instantly and constantly
reneweth the work of creation." Let "the bit of green sod under your
feet be the sweetest to you in this world, in any world." Half the joy
of life is in lit