Monday, February 25, 2013

Beauty of spirit



Triune beauty is that of the body, mind and soul; who can resist? Beauty of the soul may come in the most distressing disguises, and the following quote tells of the spirit’s beauty without that of body or mind, but still it captures us.


“And now there is beauty of the spirit; the mind in its perfect flowering,
Fragrant, expanded into the soul, full of love and blessed.
Go to some squalid couch, some famishing death-bed of the poor;
He is shrunken, cadaverous, diseased; -- there is here no beauty of body:
Never has he fed on knowledge, nor drank at the steams of science,
He is of the common herd, illiterate; -- there is here no beauty of reason:
But lo! His filming eye is bright with love from heaven,’
In every look it beams with praise, as worshipping with angels;
What honeycomb is hived upon his lips, eloquent of gratitude and prayer,---
What triumph shrined serene upon that clammy brow,
What glory flickering transparent under those thin cheeks, ---
What beauty in his face: --- Is it not the face of an angel?” Martin F. Tupper.

 This beauty of spirit is what has kept me going back to the nursing homes, having seen it so many times. 

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