“Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair; belongs not to the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times.  ‘Happiness, our being’s end and aim,’ is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world.  The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done.  Not, ’I can’t eat!’ but, ‘I can’t work!’ that was the burden of all wise complaining among men.  It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man—­that he cannot work—­that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled.”

* * * * *

“The latest Gospel in this world, is, know thy work and do it.  ‘Know thyself;’ long enough has that poor ‘self’ of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to ‘know’ it, I believe!  Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual; know what thou canst work at; and work at it like a Hercules!  That will be thy better plan.”

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“Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.  He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it!  How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one’s existence, like an ever-deepening river, there it runs and flows;—­draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest glass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream.  How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small.  Labour is life!”

* * * * *

“Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil?  Complain not.  Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow workmen there, in God’s eternity—­surviving there—­they alone surviving—­sacred band of the Immortals.  Even in the weak human memory they survive so long as saints, as heroes, as gods; they alone surviving—­peopling, they alone, the immeasured solitudes of time!  To thee, Heaven, though severe, is not unkind.  Heaven is kind, as a noble mother—­as that Spartan mother, saying, as she gave her son his shield, ’with it, my son, or upon it!’

“And, who art thou that braggest of thy life of idleness; complacently showest thy bright gilt equipages; sumptuous cushions; appliances for the folding of the hands to more sleep?  Looking up, looking down, around, behind, or before, discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any idle hero, saint, god, or even devil?  Not a vestige of one.  ’In the heavens, in the earth, in the waters under the earth, is none like unto thee.’  Thou art an original figure in this creation, a denizen in Mayfair alone.  One monster there is in the world:  the idle man.  What is his ‘religion?’ That nature is a phantasm, where cunning, beggary, or thievery, may sometimes find good victual.”

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