The Everlasting Yea

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 283, 24 August 1940, Page 15

The Everlasting Yea

“Fortitude is one of the greatest things in flhc world. That is because it is a positive thing, idealistic, and idealism possesses! a quality that such lesser counterparts as endurance and resignation have not, and, in spite of their inherent nobility, cannot *bave. Simply to endure the present, sinjply to accept with resignation the slings an'd arrows of outrageous fortune, is to find .cold comfort, little inspiration, for the time that may lie abend. Even the animals have endurance. “But fortitude is a spiritual thing: at its very root is an assurance that jf man can only hold out—“‘Sudden the worst turns the best to •the brave, The black minute’s at end, And. the element’s rage, the fiend voices that rave Shall dwindle, shall blend, Shall change, sflial-1 become first a peace out oif pain, Then a light . . ’ “So wrote Robert Browning, and as there must be more fortitude on the earth today than ever there was in the whole history of mankind—recent example has again dwarfed precept—our Browning and the Brownings of other lands, other languages', have become world-poets, with a message to hearten the whole world.

That sturdy philosopher of the last century, Thomas Carlyle, may foe regarded as, in essence, the prose-writ-ing equivalent of Browning. Carlyle, speaking of fortitude in hie own fashion, had a name for it —“The Everlasting Yea.’ ” —“Liverpool Post.”