• Author: Miller, Charles Grant
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume 5
• Page Number:
• Date: 1 5 1916
• Tags:
• advice
• proverb

WHAT WE LOVE IS OURS Charles Grant Muller This is a world of beauty, not to those who have money to pluck and wear its roses, but to those. who have souls sensitized to the sweet odors. With love of the beautiful in, man and in nature none can be poor; without it none can be rich. Happiness is not carried in the pocket, but in the heart. The millionaire may make his thousand-acre park in the rich valley and by a fiction of the law call it his own; but it all is the front yard of the poorest squatter in the rudest cabin on the rugged hillside. The one who has paid for it owns it? No! It is most truly possessed by the one who most enjoys it. What can a beautiful park mean to a man whose heart is smothered in a moneybag? And to him who loves the trees, the brooks, the hills, the sky, what matters it who holds the title? Why, Adam and Eve never had a deed to Eden! Descendants of theirs today hold deeds, but not possession. It was not the land itself which was taken away, but the power to enjoy it. What we love is ours—and nothing more. We can truly possess nothing that we sacrifice to our own selfish purposes. It is only to the man who is poor that. wealth glows like a bright star in the night. The law of recompense always is in force. It is only when darkness shrouds the world that we can see the light of a million others. Did we not learn in babyhood that the bubble is brilliant only until. we grasp it? The gems in the fine lady's hair and at her throat sparkle not for her eyes, but for the eyes of others. She owns only some costly stones —never the priceless light that dances in them. This priceless treasure is only for them who love it, and for them it is scattered broadcast at their very feet in countless myriads of frost flakes on the brown winter earth and in the morning dewdrops in the summer grass. What we love we own—and there our real possession end. If our love be greed and lust, then these stinging serpents of vice will creep, into the heart and make it their abode. But to the soul where love is pure all in the world that is good and sweet flies straight and swift ; as homing doves. Yes, what we love is ours, and in the same degree as we love, we own. All that is worthwhile in the world we may own, if we will.