one soul
that basks in light, a thousand perish in darkness; I dare not let you
go on longer in your dangerous belief that the world is one wide
paradise, and that the high-road of its joys is the path of reckless
selfishness. Can you not think that there are lots worse than that of a
guiltless child who is well loved and well guarded, and has all her
future still before her?

* * *

It rests with you to live your life nobly or vilely. We have not our
choice to be rich or poor, to be happy or unhappy, to be in health or in
sickness; but we have our choice to be worthy or worthless. No
antagonist can kill our soul in us; that can perish only from its own
suicide. Ever remember that.

* * *

But they are hollow inside, you still urge? fie, for shame! What a plea
that is! Have you the face to make it? If you have, let me bargain with
you.

When all the love that is fair and false goes begging for believers, and
all the passion that is a sham fails to find one fool to buy it; when
all the priests and politicians clap in vain together the brazen cymbals
of their tongues, because their listeners will not hearken to brass
clangour, nor accept it for the music of the spheres; when all the
creeds, that feast and fatten upon the cowardice and selfishness of men,
are driven out of hearth and home, and mart and temple, as impostors
that put on the white beard of reverence and righteousness to pass
current a cheater's coin; when all the kings that promise peace while
they swell their armouries and armies; when all the statesmen that
chatter of the people's weal as they steal up to the locked casket where
coronets are kept; when all the men who talk of "glory," and prate of an
"idea" that they may stretch their nation's boundary, and filch their
neighbour's province--when all these are no longer in the land, and no
more looked on with favour, then I will believe your cry that you hate
the toys which are hollow.

* * *

Can an ignorant or an untrained brain follow the theory of light, or the
metamorphosis of plants? Yet it may rejoice in the rays of a summer sun,
in the scent of a nest of wild-flowers. So may it do in my music. Shall
I ask higher payment than the God of the sun and the violets asks for
Himself?

* * *

Once there were three handmaidens of Krishna's; invisible, of course, to
the world of men. They begged of Krishna, one day, to tes