Death's Most Active Agent — Worry

1914

Worry, Never Hard Work, Responsible for the Decimation of the Human Races

We hear daily of men and women who are "working themselves to death." But work is as surely the friend of man as worry is his deadliest foe. Unless carking care and sickening foreboding are blent with labor, work never kills. Yet worry slays its tens and hundreds of thousands every year.

The person who wishes to live long and beneficently should cultivate the desire to see others as comfortable as he wishes to be himself. He must not regret that others are better off in what makes living pleasant.

Here is a fact that some so-called philanthropists never learn: there lives not the human creature who is wholly uninteresting. Be on the alert to espy something in those whom you meet that will commend them to your regard. Listlessness and the capacity for being bored bring more old people to the grave than disease or actual sorrow. If you have no other "job" in life, make one by forcing yourself to be interested in the welfare of your associates. — Youth's Companion.


Midnight Inspirations

Many eminent men have done some of their most famous work in bed. Indeed, no small part of the world's literary treasures have been produced between the sheets by physically indolent although mentally active men of genius.

Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus" came to him as he was sitting by his fireside on the night after a violent storm. He went to bed, but could not sleep; the Hesperus would not be denied, and as he lay the verses flowed on without let or hindrance until the poem was completed. Wordsworth used to go to bed after his morning walk, and, while breakfasting there, dictate the lines he had composed while walking. One at least of Rossini's operas was composed in bed. — Manchester Evening News.