Old Friends

Just to prove that I remember,

I send this greeting true,

To remind you I am faithful

To old times, old friends,

And you.

Sermon in Rhyme

If you have a friend worth loving,

Love him.  Yes, and let him know

That you love him, ere life’s evening

Tinge his brow with sunset glow.

Why should good words ne’er be said

Of a friend—till he is dead?

If you hear a song that thrills you,

Sung by any child of song,

Praise it.  Do not let the singer

Wait deservèd praises long.

Why should one who thrills your heart

Lack the joy you may impart?

If you hear a prayer that moves you

By its humble, pleading tone,

Join it.  Do not let the seeker

Bow before his God alone.

Why should not your brother share

The strength of “two or three” in prayer?

If you see the hot tears falling

From a brother’s weeping eyes,

Share them.  And by kindly sharing

Own our kinship in the skies.

Why should any one be glad

When a brother’s heart is sad?

If a silvery laugh goes rippling

Through the sunshine on his face,

Share it.  ‘Tis the wise man’s saying—

For both grief and joy a place.

There’s health and goodness in the mirth

In which an honest laugh has birth.

If your work is made more easy

By a friendly, helping hand,

Say so.  Speak out brave and truly

Ere the darkness veil the land.

Should a brother workman dear

Falter for a word of cheer?

Scatter thus your seeds of kindness

All enriching as you go—

Leave them.  Trust the Harvest-Giver;

He will make each seed to grow.

So, until the happy end,

Your life shall never lack a friend.

Companionship on the Road

As we came up the hill there was difficulty, and here and there a hard pull, to be sure but strength, and spirits, and all sorts of cheery incidents and companionship on the road.[1]

-       Thackeray[2]

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[1] This passage is from Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers - 9: On a Joke I Once Heard from the Late Thomas Hood.

[2] William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta, India in 1811, the son and grandson of officers of the East India Company. His father died when he was six; the next William was sent to school in England. After some years at private schools, he entered the Charterhouse in 1822, and remained till 1828. Neither there nor at Cambridge, where he was a member of Trinity College for a year and a half, did he distinguish himself as a scholar.  He finally left the university because he felt he was wasting his time, and determined to finish his education by travel. During a stay of several months at Weimar he became friendly with Goethe. On his return to England he took up the study of law; he was later called to the bar but never practiced.

                                                                         

William’s father had left him a considerable fortune, most of which had disappeared by the time he was twenty-three, part lost in an unsuccessful newspaper, part in unfortunate investments, and part through gambling. Finding that he had to earn his bread, he resolved to study art, and in 1834 went to Paris for this purpose. Two years later he was appointed Paris correspondent of a short-lived paper, The Constitutionalist, and on the strength of this he married Isabella Shawe, the daughter of an Irish officer. After four years of happy married life, Mrs. Thackeray’s mind gave way, and though she lived till 1894 she never recovered.

For a number of years William had to struggle to keep his head above water, writing for newspaper and periodicals and doing a good deal of illustrating. Though he never acquired great technical skill as a draftsman, he had a gift of turning out amusing sketches, and for ten years he was on the staff of Punch as both artist and author. It was in that publication, with The Snobs of England, that he first achieved popularity, his earlier novels having failed to hit the popular taste. In 1847 his serialized Vanity Fair found great success; by its conclusion he belonged to the first rank of English novelists.

Further novels strengthened his reputation. In 1851 he took up lecturing, first in London, and in 1852, in an American tour. He was received with great hospitality, made many friends, and went home the next spring the richer by some $10,000. A second tour in America followed in 1855, and was also successful.

                                                                                                                                                                   

Thackeray was now one of the notable figures of English society and was financially at ease. In 1857 he stood for Parliament for the city of Oxford, narrowly losing. Apparently little downcast, he returned to his literary work and issued The Virginians, 1857–59. With this book the quality of his work began to fall off, and none of his subsequent novels achieved great success. In 1860 he undertook the editorship of the newly founded Cornhill Magazine; to it he contributed his delightful essays, The Roundabout Papers. But his health, which for years had been far from good, unfitted him for the labor of editorship, and he resigned in 1862. On the morning before Christmas, 1863, he was found dead.  (Source: William Allan Neilson in his prefatory notes for a 1917 edition of Vanity Fair)

Friendship

Every living soul responds to an expression of friendship.  It holds men together, vitalizes and makes any organization alive.

Auld Lang Syne

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And the days of auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

-       Robert Burns[1]

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[1] Born in Alloway, Scotland, in 1759, Robert Burns was the first of William and Agnes Burns’ seven children. His father, a tenant farmer, educated his children at home. Robert also attended one year of mathematics schooling and, between 1765 and 1768, he attended an “adventure” school established by his father and John Murdock. His father died in bankruptcy in 1784, and Robert and his brother Gilbert took over the farming. This hard labor later contributed to the heart trouble Robert suffered as an adult.

At the age of fifteen, Burns had fallen in love and written his first poem. As a young man, he pursued both love and poetry with uncommon zeal. In 1785, he fathered the first of his fourteen children. His biographer, DeLancey Ferguson, said “it was not so much that he was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously.” Between 1784 and 1785, Burns wrote many of the poems collected in his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, printed in 1786 and paid for by subscriptions. It was an immediate success; Robert was celebrated throughout England and Scotland as a great “peasant-poet.”

In 1788, he and his wife, Jean Armour, settled in Ellisland, where Burns was given a commission as an excise officer. He also began to assist James Johnson in collecting folk songs for an anthology entitled The Scots Musical Museum. He spent the final twelve years of his life editing and imitating traditional folk songs for this volume and for Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. These volumes were essential in preserving parts of Scotland’s cultural heritage and include such well-known songs as My Luve is Like a Red Red Rose and Auld Land Syne. He died from heart disease at the age of thirty-seven. On the day of his death, his wife gave birth to his last son, Maxwell.

Most of Burns’ poems were written in Scots. They document and celebrate traditional Scottish culture, expressions of farm life, and class and religious distinctions. He wrote in a variety of forms: epistles to friends, ballads, and songs. His best-known poem is the mock-heroic Tam o’ Shanter. He is also well known for the over three hundred songs he wrote which celebrate love, friendship, work, and drink with often hilarious and tender sympathy. Even today, he is often referred to as the National Bard of Scotland.  (Source: poets.org)

Four Friends

For greater gifts I would not pray

Nor ask the gods to send my way

If I could have four friends a day

A friend of better days than this,

Of brighter sun and golden bliss

Before the times had gone amiss.

A friend of worse days, dark and drear,

Who shared the hours of storms and fear,

Before the skies began to clear.

A friend new made who shall afford

Adventures of the unexplored.

A friend with happy future stored.

An old friend who has stood the test,

Has known the worst and known the best,

Alike in both forever blest.

-       Anonymous

Style

If a person admires a particular method of arranging words, that arrangement will occur naturally in his own diction, without malice aforethought.  Some writers unconsciously fall into the mode of expression adopted by others.  This illustrates a similarity of disposition, and is not imitation.  As a style, when it is natural, comes rather from the heart than the head, men of similar tastes and feelings will be likely to fall into a similar form of expression.

-       Edwin P. Whipple[1]

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[1] Edwin Percy Whipple born in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1819. A powerful essayist, for a time he was the main literary critic for Philadelphia-based Graham’s Magazine. Later, in 1848, he became the Boston correspondent to the Literary World under Evert Augustus Duyckinck and George Long Duyckinck. Historian Perry Miller called Edwin “Boston’s most popular critic.”

He was a close friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne. After Hawthorne’s death in 1864, Whipple served as a pallbearer alongside Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Thomas Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Edwin died in 1886 and was interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Friendship

Friendship is to be valued for what there is in it, not what can be gotten out of it.  When two people appreciate each other, because each has found the other convenient to have around, they are not friends; they are simply acquaintances with a business understanding.  To seek friendship for its utility is as futile as to seek the other end of a rainbow for its bag of gold.  A true friend is always useful in the highest sense; but we should beware of thinking of our friends as brother members of a mutual benefit association, with its periodical demands and threats of suspension for non-payment of dues.

-       Turnbull

Loving

“I live for those who love me,

For those who know me true,

For the heaven that smiles above me

And waits my coming too.

For the cause that needs assistance,

For the wrong that needs resistance,

For the future in the distance,

For the good that I may do.”

-       C. L. Banks

Shake

It’s great to say “Good Morning,”

It’s fine to say “Hello.”

But better still to grasp the hand

Of a loyal friend you know.

A look may be forgotten,

A word misunderstood,

But the touch of the human hand

Is the pledge of brotherhood.

-       E. O. G.

You’ve been a Friend to Me

This old time song has been kindly forwarded in response to an enquiry lately met with in this column.  No information is at hand regarding either its authorship or music.[1]

My barque of life was tossing down

The troubled stream of time,

When first I saw your smiling face,

When youth was in its prime.

My days of darkness turned to light,

My troubled heart was free;

And since that time I’ve always found

You’ve been a friend to me.

Chorus:

I’ll ne’er forget where’er I roam,

Wherever you may be,

If ever I have had a friend,

You’ve been a friend to me.

Misfortune nursed me as her own,

And loved me fondly too;

I would have had a broken heart

If it had not been for you;

Kind words were whispered soft and low,

But glad I could not be

Until I found that you had been

A faithful friend to me.

Chorus

The light of hope in your bright eyes

Dispelled the clouds of strife,

And through the rift the sun shone down

My weary path of life.

I now look back upon the past,

Along life’s stormy sea,

And smile to think ‘mid all life’s scenes

You’ve been a friend to me.

Chorus

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[1] My research found this song was written in 1879 by William Shakespeare Hays. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1837 and died there in 1907. His parents were Hugh and Martha (Richardson) Hays. He married Belle McCullough in 1865. His most popular songs were Evangeline (1862), The Drummer Boy of Shiloh (1863), We Parted by the River (1866), The Little Old Cabin in the Lane (1871), Molly Darling (1871) [with 3 million copies published], Susan Jane (1871), Oh! Sam (1872), Angels Meet Me at the Cross Roads (1875). Early in de Mornin’ (1877), Roll Out! Heave Dat Cotton (1877). He composed approximately 350 songs. (Source: ibiblio.org)