Courage in the Use of Talent

BY SYDNEY SMITH

Rev. Sydney Smith (1771-1845): An English clergyman and writer, distinguished for his wit, humor, and conversational powers. He published among other works several volumes of sermons, and "Letters on the Subject of the Catholics," which greatly promoted the cause of Catholic emancipation. This selection is from a "Lecture on the Conduct of the Understanding."

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves a number of obscure men who have only remained obscure because their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort; and who, if they could only have been induced 5 to begin, would in all probability have gone great lengths in the career of fame. The fact is, that to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the brink, and thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.

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It will not do to be perpetually calculating risks and adjusting nice chances. It did very well before the flood, when a man could consult his friends upon an intended. scheme for a hundred and fifty years, and then live to see its success for six or seven centuries afterward. But at 15 present, a man waits and doubts and hesitates, and consults his brother and his uncle and his first cousins and particular friends, till one fine day he finds that he is sixty-five years of age; that he has lost so much time in consulting first cousins and particular friends, that he has 20 no more time left to follow their advice.

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Orpheus with his Lute

FROM "KING HENRY VIII.," BY WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,

Bow themselves when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung, as sun and showers

There had made a lasting spring.

Everything that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,

Hung their heads, and then lay by.

In sweet music is such art,

Killing care and grief of heart

Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

Ôr'phe (fe) us: according to Greek mythology, a musician whose lyre could charm beasts and move trees and stones.

The Poetry in Words

By R. C. TRENCH

Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886): An English clergyman and philologist. He was the author of several volumes of poems and religious works, and some volumes on philology. The most popular of his philological works is a series of lectures "On the Study of Words," from which this selection is taken.

Language is full of instruction, because it is the embodiment, the incarnation, if I may so speak, of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea, often of many nations, and of all which through long centuries they have attained to and won. It stands like the Pillars 5 of Hercules, to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these. The mighty moral instincts which have been working in the popular mind have found 10 therein their unconscious voice; and the single kinglier spirits that have looked deeper into the heart of things have oftentimes gathered up all they have seen into some one word, which they have launched upon the world, and with which they have enriched it forever, making in that 15 new word a new region of thought to be henceforward in some sort the common heritage of all.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of 20 genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning. "Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they 25 sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion."

And for all these reasons far more and mightier in every way is a language than any one of the works 30 which may have been composed in it. For that work,

great as it may be, is but the embodying of the mind of a single man, this of a nation. The "Iliad” is great, yet not so great in strength or power or beauty as the Greek language. "Paradise Lost" is a noble possession 5 for a people to have inherited, but the English tongue is a nobler heritage yet.

Great indeed will be our gains if, having these treasures of wisdom and knowledge lying round about us, so far more precious than mines of California gold, we deter10 mine that we will make what portion of them we can our own, that we will ask the words which we use to give an account of themselves, to say whence they are, and whither they tend.

Poetry, which is passion and imagination embodying 15 themselves in words, does not necessarily demand a combination of words for this; of this passion and imagination a single word may be the vehicle. As the sun can image itself alike in a tiny dewdrop or in the mighty ocean, and can do it, though on a different scale, as per20 fectly in the one as in the other, so the spirit of poetry

can dwell in and glorify alike a word and an "Iliad.” Nothing in language is too small, as nothing is too great, for it to fill with its presence. Every where it can find, or, not finding, can make, a shrine for itself, which after25 ward it can render translucent and transparent with its own indwelling glory.

On every side we are beset with poetry. Popular language is full of it, of words used in an imaginative sense, of things called and not merely in transient moments 30 of high passion and in the transfer which at such moments finds place of the image to the thing imaged,

but permanently-by names having immediate reference not to what they are, but to what they are like.

Let me illustrate my meaning by the word "tribulation." We all know in a general way that this word, which occurs not seldom in Scripture, means affliction, sorrow, 5 anguish; but it is quite worth our while to know how it means this, and to question the word a little closer. It is derived from the Latin tribulum, which was the threshing instrument, or roller, whereby the Roman husbandman separated the corn from the husks; and tribulatio 10 in its primary significance was the act of this separation. But some Latin writer of the Christian church appropriated the word and image for the setting forth of a higher truth; and sorrow, distress, and adversity being the appointed means for the separating in men of whatever 15 in them was light, trivial, and poor from the solid and the true, their chaff from their wheat, therefore he called these sorrows and trials tribulations, threshings, that

is, of the inner spiritual man, without which there could be no fitting him for the heavenly garner.

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Before leaving this part of my subject, and on the suggestion of this word "tribulation," I will quote some words from Coleridge. They bear on the matter we have in hand. He has said, "In order to get the full sense of the word, we should first present to our minds the visual 25 image that forms its primary meaning." What admirable counsel is here. If we could but accustom ourselves to the doing of this, what vast increases of precision and force would all the language which we speak and which others speak to us, obtain; how often would that which 30 is now obscure at once become clear; how distinct the