The Frenchman, glowing with national pride, drunk: “France—the moon whose mild, steady, cheering rays are the delight of all nations; consoling them in darkness and making their dreariness beautiful.”
This furnished Franklin with a fine opening, and his quaint humor bubbled over in his retort: “George Washington—the Joshua, who commanded the sun and the moon to stand still and they obeyed him.”
(3435)
See [Life, The Simple].
WASHINGTON’S GENIUS
Brilliant I will not call him, if the brightness of the rippling river exceed the solemn glory of old ocean. Brilliant I will not call him, if darkness must be visible in order to display the light; for he had none of that rocket-like brilliancy which flames in instant coruscation across the black brow of night, and then is not. But if a steady, unflickering flame, slow rising to its lofty sphere, dispensing far and wide its rays, revealing all things on which it shines in due proportions and large relations, making right, duty, and destiny so plain that in the vision we are scarce conscious of the light—if this be brilliancy, then the genius of Washington was as full-orbed and luminous as the god of day in his zenith.—John W. Daniel.
(3436)
Washington’s Humility—See [Life, The Simple].
WASTE
Water washes everything, touches everything, impregnates everything. Nothing escapes it. Incessantly, everywhere, whatever it meets, is dissolved and finally deposited in the immense common receptacle of the oceanic basins.