THE HONEYED PHRASE OF COMPLIMENT
As the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire was one day stepping out of her carriage, a coal-heaver, who was accidentally standing by, and was about to regale himself with his accustomed whiff of tobacco, caught a glance of her countenance, and instantly exclaimed: “Love and bless you, my lady, let me light my pipe in your eyes.” The duchess was so delighted with this compliment that she frequently afterwards checked the strain of adulation, which was so constantly offered to her charms, by saying, “Oh, after the coal-heaver’s compliment, all others are insipid.”
Another compliment, true and genuine, was paid by a sailor, who was sent by his captain to carry a letter to the lady of his love. The sailor, having delivered his missive, stood gazing in silent admiration upon the face of the lady, for she was very beautiful.
“Well, my good man, for what do you wait? There is no answer to be returned.”
“Lady,” the sailor replied, with becoming deference, “I would like to know your name.”
“Did you not see it on the letter?”
“Pardon, lady, I never learned to read. Mine has been a hard, rough life.”
“And for what reason, my good man, would you like to know my name?”
“Because,” answered the old tar, looking honestly up, “in a storm at sea, with danger or death before me, I would like to call the name of the brightest thing I’d ever seen in my life. There’d be sunshine in it, even in the thick darkness.”
Tom Hood wrote to his wife: “I never was anything till I knew you—and I have been better, happier, and a more prosperous man ever since. Lay that truth by in lavender, and remind me of it when I fail. I am writing fondly and warmly; but not without good cause. First, your own affectionate letter, lately received; next, the remembrance of our dear children, pledges of our dear old familiar love; then a delicious impulse to pour out the overflowing of my heart into yours; and last, not least, the knowledge that your dear eyes will read what my hands are now writing. Perhaps there is an afterthought that, whatever may befall me, the wife of my bosom will have this acknowledgment of her tenderness, worth, and excellence, of all that is wifely or womanly, from my pen.”
Samuel Rogers once told Dean Stanley that when he was a boy he remembered being present at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s last lecture, and at the end of the lecture he saw Mr. Burke go up to Sir Joshua, and on that solemn occasion quote the lines from “Paradise Lost”:—
“The angel ended, and in Adam’s ear
So charming left his voice, that he, awhile
Thought him still speaking.”
Among the candidates for the St. Louis Post Office was Miss Phebe Cozzens. During a call upon President Hayes a day or two after his inauguration, she told him that General Grant, when he had so much trouble to find a suitable man to make Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, assured her that if the Senate refused to confirm Judge Waite, he would nominate her. President Hayes replied that she certainly would have made a most charming Chief Justice, and that if she had held the office when he took the oath he should have been tempted to kiss her instead of the Bible.
Whittier was so well pleased at the manner in which Lizzie Barton Fuller rendered some of his poems at a public meeting at Amesbury, Massachusetts, that he wrote her the following grateful acknowledgment:
Thanks for the pleasant voice that lent
Such sweetness to my simple lays;
I hardly knew them as my own—
Interpreting the thought I meant,
And winning for my rhymes a praise
Due, haply, to thyself alone.
In vain the hand essays its skill,
Unaided by the organ’s keys;
In vain the bugler’s breath until
The horn repeats his melodies.
Among the tributes to Rev. James Freeman Clarke, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of his birth, in Boston, were the following lines in a poem read by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe:
What nuptials hast thou blest,
What dear ones laid to rest,
What infants welcomed with the holy sign.
Life’s hospitality
Was so akin to thee
That half thy good and ill was thine.
In dark, perplexing days,
Where sorrow silenced praise,
We saw thy light above the vapors dim;
In battle’s din and shout
Thy clarion blast rang out,
“The victory is God’s; we follow him.”
Thy life has been like ours,
Its sunshine and its showers
Have reached the heights of joy, the depths of grief;
But richer hath it been
In all the gifts serene
That make the leader, brother, friend, and chief.
Bring then the palm and vine,
Roses with lilies twine,
And let us image in our offered wreath
The life enriched with toil,
The consecrating oil,
And love that fears not time and knows not death.
One of the South American representatives at the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Señor Zotoza, paid the following compliment to the women of the United States:
“Among modern women none take a higher rank; and, indeed, justice compels me to say the American woman stands at the very head of her sex for her virtues, for her independence, her individuality, and for all those qualities which make the equal of man in intelligence and force of character, and the superior in every other quality. To her, with her virtues, no less than to the opposite sex, do the United States owe that freedom and prosperity which are the admiration and wonder of all nations.”