Patientia
Toil on, O troubled brain,
With anxious thoughts and busy scenes opprest,
Ere long release shall reach thee. A brief pain!
Then—rest!
Watch still, O heavy eyes,
A little longer must ye vigil keep;
And lo! your lids shall close at morning’s rise
In sleep.
Throb yet, O aching heart,
Still pulse the flagging current without cease;
When you a few hours more have played your part,
Comes Peace.
Bear up, then, weary soul!
Short is the path remaining to be trod—
Lay down the fleshy shroud and touch the goal—
Then—God!
Tom. Hood.
A friend of John Adams, our second President, called upon him one day towards the close of his life, to inquire after his health. “I am not well,” he replied; “I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement, open to the winds, and broken in upon by the storms; and what is worse, from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair.”
Faith, Hope, and Love were questioned what they thought
Of future glory, which religion taught:
Now Faith believed it firmly to be true,
And Hope expected so to find it, too:
Love answered smiling with a conscious glow,
“Believe? Expect? I know it to be so.”
Mountford says in “Euthanasy”:
“Faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love. And in that there is all comfort for them that hope to meet again. Love! Why should we doubt it will have its objects? for that faith will have its, we are sure; and love is greater than faith. If there is a heaven for our faith, there are friends in it for our love. I have known those who have grown holy through thoughts of the dead. We are saved by hope, and some of us by the special hope of being with our friends again. So that if there is salvation by hope, our friends whom we so hope for we shall certainly have again. We are not to sorrow for the dead as those that have no hope; now this implies our knowing our friends hereafter; because our grief is for their having been taken from us, and not for their having been taken into happiness.”