We never pay anyone Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!
Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.
Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.
If you can wait, and not be tired by waiting ... if you can dream, and not make dreams your master; if you can think, and not make thoughts your aim; if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same; ... yours is the earth and everything that's in it...
You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.
The beasts are very wise,
Their mouths are clean of lies,
They talk one to the other,
Bullock to bullock brothers
Resting after their labors,
Each in stall with his neighbors,
But man with goad and whip,
Breaks up their fellowship,
Shouts in their silky ears
Filling their soul with fears.
When he has plowed the land,
He says: "they understand."
But the beasts in stall together,
Freed from the yoke and tether,
Say as the torn flank smoke:
"Nay, 'twas the whip that spoke."