Festus (1839)

Festus (1872 edition) at the Internet Archive · (1889 edition) at Google Books

• Evil and good are God's right hand and left.
  • Proem

• Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.
  • Proem

• Let each man think himself an act of God,
  His mind a thought, his life a breath of God;
  And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds,
  To show the most of Heaven he hath in him.
  • Proem

• Night brings out stars as sorrow shows us truths.

• Any heart turned Godward feels more joy
  In one short hour of prayer, than e'er was raised
  By all the feasts of earth since its foundation.

• I cannot be content with less than heaven;
  Living, and comprehensive of all life.
  Thee, universal heaven, celestial all;
  Thee, sacred seat of intellective time;
  Field of the soul's best wisdom: home of truth,
  Star-throned.

• Men might be better if we better deemed
  Of them. The worst way to improve the world
  Is to condemn it.
  • Scene IV, A Mountain; Sunrise. Compare: "The surest plan to make a man / Is to think him so", J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, II, ii. St. 9

• We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
  In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
  We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
  Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
  Life's but a means unto an end; that end
  Beginning, mean, and end to all things, — God.
  The dead have all the glory of the world.
  • Scene V, A Country Town

• Who never doubted never half believed
  Where doubt there truth is—'t is her shadow.
  • Scene V, A Country Town; comparable to Alfred, Lord Tennyson "There lives more faith in honest doubt / Believe me, than in half the creeds."

• America thou half-brother of the world!
  With something good and bad of every land.
  • Scene X, Earth's Surface

• Music tells no truths.
  • Scene XI, A Village Feast

• While men are what they are; while they have bad
  Passions to be roused up: while ruled by men;
  While all the powers and treasures of a land
  At beck of the ambitious, wrongs may be
  Offered, with insult; yea, while rights are worth
  Maintaining; freedom keeping, or life having,
  So long dread I, the sword shall shine.

• Poets are all who love, who feel great truths,
  And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
  • Scene XVI, The Hesperian Sphere

• The worst men often give the best advice.

• They who forgive most shall be most forgiven.

• Kindness is wisdom. There is none in life
  But needs it, and may learn.

• Envy's a coal comes hissing hot from hell.

• Respect is what we owe; love what we give.

• Prayer is the spirit speaking truth to Truth.