I Don't Feel Sure About Doing Good

Love Is Such A Simple Thing When We Have Only One-and-twenty Summers And A Sweet Girl Of Seventeen Trembles Under Our Glance, As If She Were A Bud First Opening Her Heart With Wondering Rapture To The Morning. Such Young Unfurrowed Souls Roll To Meet Each Other Like Two Velvet Peaches That Touch Softly And Are At Rest; They Mingle As Easily As Two Brooklets That Ask For Nothing But To Entwine Themselves And Ripple With Ever-interlacing Curves In The Leafiest Hiding-places.

It Is Not Ignoble To Feel That The Fuller Life Which A Sad Experience Has Brought Us Is Worth Our Personal Share Of Pain. The Growth Of Higher Feeling Within Us Is Like The Growth Of Faculty, Bringing With It A Sense Of Added Strength. We Can No More Wish To Return To A Narrower Sympathy Than Painters Or Musicians Can Wish To Return To Their Cruder Manner, Or Philosophers To Their Less Complete Formulas.

Consequences Are Unpitying. Our Deeds Carry Their Terrible Consequences, Quite Apart From Any Fluctuations That Went Before—consequences That Are Hardly Ever Confined To Ourselves. And It Is Best To Fix Our Minds On That Certainty, Instead Of Considering What May Be The Elements Of Excuse For Us.

Things Are Achieved When They Are Well Begun. The Perfect Archer Calls The Deer His Own While Yet The Shaft Is Whistling.

Men And Women Make Sad Mistakes About Their Own Symptoms, Taking Their Vague Uneasy Longings, Sometimes For Genius, Sometimes For Religion, And Oftener Still For A Mighty Love.