Of Life

Of Life

The epitome of common life is seen in the common epitaph,

Born on such a day, and dead on such another, with an interval of threescore years.

For time has been wasted on the senses, and that leads hourly to the diminishing of spirit:

Lean is the soul and it pines away in the midst of abundance for the body:

He forgot the worlds to which he was intended, and the true nobility creatures were made for,

Nor does he listen to hope or wholesome fear, lest it stir him from his hardened satisfaction.

And this is death in life; to be sunk beneath the waters of every day life,

Without one feebly-struggling sense of an airier spiritual realm:

Affection, fancy, feeling ---dead; imagination, conscience, faith,

All willfully expunged, till they leave the man a mere carcass.

See that you have life, while you are alive:

for the heart must live, and the soul,

But worry and sloth and sin and self, combine to kill that life.

A man will grow into a machine, an appendage to the counter or the desk,

If the mind and spirit be not roused, to raise up the plodding groveler:

Then Praise God for Sabbaths, for books, and dreams, and pains,

Also for the recreative face of  nature and for kindling loves within the home;

And remember, you that labor, -- your leisure is not a loss,

If it helps to expose and undermine that solid falsehood, -- the Material.

Martin F. Tupper.