Margaret’s Song

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  There was a king in Thule,  True even to the grave;  To whom his dying mistress  A golden beaker gave.  At every feast he drained it,  Naught was to him so dear,  And often as he drained it,  Gush’d from his eyes the tear.  When death came, unrepining  His cities o’er he told;  All to his heir resigning,  Except his cup of gold.  With many a knightly vassal  At a royal feast sat he,  In yon proud hall ancestral,  In his castle o’er the sea.  Up stood the jovial monarch,  And quaff’d his last life’s glow,  Then hurled the hallow’d goblet  Into the flood below.  He saw it splashing, drinking,  And plunging in the sea;  His eyes meanwhile were sinking,  And never again drank he. “Margaret’s Song” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in “Faust. Part I.”

The Keen Edge

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"I believe, also, that one of the best ways of convincing men of error is not so much to denounce the error as to proclaim the Truth more clearly. If a stick is very crooked and you wish to prove that it is so, get a straight one and quietly lay it down by its side. When men look, they will surely see the difference. The Word of God has a very keen edge about it and all the cutting words you need you had better borrow from there." --Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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