ANGER. I. ANGER is a professed enemy to counsel; it is a direct storm, in which no man can be heard to speak or call from without: for if you counsel gently, you are despised; if you urge it and be vehement, you provoke it more. 2. Of all passions it endeavours most to make reason useless. 3. That it is a universal passion, of an infinite object; for no man was ever so amorous as to love a toad; none so envious, as to repine at the condition of the miserable; no man so timorous as to fear a dead bee; but anger is troubled at every thing, and every man, and every accident: and therefore, unless it be suppressed, it will make a man's condition restless. 4. If it proceeds from a great cause, it turns to fury; if from a small cause it is peevishness and so is always either terrible or ridiculous. 5. It is neither manly nor ingenuous. 6. It proceeds from softness of spirit and pusillanimity; which makes, that women are more angry than men, sick persons more than the healthful, old men more than young, unprosperous and calamitous people than the blessed and fortunate. 7. It is troublesome, not only to those that suffer it, but to them that behold it; there being no greater incivility of entertainment, than, for the cook's fault or the negligence of the servants, to be cruel or outrageous, or unpleasant in the presence of guests. 8. It makes marriage to be a necessary and unavoidable trouble; friendships, and societies, and familiarities to be intolerable. 9. It multiplies the evils of drunkenness, and makes the levities of wine to run into madness. 10. It makes innocent jesting to be the beginning of tragedies. 11. It turns friendship into hatred; it makes a man lose himself, and his reason, and his argument in disputations. It changes discipline into tediousness and hatred of liberal institutions. It makes a prosperous man to be envied, and the unfortunate to be unpitied. It is a confluence of all the irregular passions there is in it envy and sorrow, fear and scorn, pride and prejudice, rashness and inconsideration, rejoicing in evil and a desire to inflict it, self-love, impatience, and curiosity. And, lastly, though it be very troublesome to others, yet it is most troublesome to him that hath it. Jeremy Taylor. THE HOLLY TREE. READER! hast thou ever stood to see The eye that contemplates it well perceives Ordered by an Intelligence so wise, As might confound the Atheist's sophistries. Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen No grazing cattle through their prickly round But, as they grow where nothing is to fear, I love to view these things with curious eyes, And moralise; And in this wisdom of the Holly Tree Can emblems see, Wherewith perchance to make a pleasant rhyme, One which may profit in the after-time. Thus, though abroad perchance I might appear Harsh and austere ; To those, who on my leisure would intrude, Reserved and rude ;— Gentle at home amid my friends I'd be, Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree. And should my youth, as youth is apt I know, Some harshness show, All vain asperities I day by day Would wear away, Till the smooth temper of my age should be And as when all the summer trees are seen The Holly leaves a sober hue display Less bright than they; But, when the bare and wint'ry woods we see, So serious should my youth appear among So would I seem amid the young and gay That in my age as cheerful I might be Southey JEHOVAH THE PROVIDER. AUTHOR of being! life-sustaining King! Lo! Want's dependent eye from Thee implores The fruits which autumn from a thousand stores Bends to the ploughman's galling yoke in vain; Can the swarth reaper grasp the golden grain? Without Thy blessing, all is black and drear; With it, the joys of Eden bloom again. Wordsworth. |