And yet how bestial is content--all the great things in life
are done by discontented people.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning,
and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should
be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning,
too: yearning to know the unknowable.
What a fine old poem is "The Pulley" by George Herbert! Those
Elizabethan fellows knew how to write! They were marred perhaps by
their idea that poems must be "witty." (Remember how Bacon said
that reading poets makes one witty? There he gave a clue to the
literature of his time.) Their fantastic puns and conceits are
rather out of our fashion nowadays. But Lord! the root of the
matter was in them! How gallantly, how reverently, they tackle the
problems of life!
When God at first made man (says George Herbert) He had a "glass of
blessings standing by." So He pours on man all the blessings in His
reservoir: strength, beauty, wisdom, honour, pleasure--and then He
refrains from giving him the last of them, which is rest, i.
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