Spiritual Quote of the Day (Gerard Manley Hopkins, on Beauty From God)

“Glory be to God for dappled things—
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
 
“All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
      Praise Him.”—English Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), “Pied Beauty”

Photo of the Day: ‘Nothing is So Beautiful As Spring’

“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.”—English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), “Spring,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (1985)
 
Yesterday, I took the image accompanying this post in Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Gerard Manley Hopkins, on Winter and ‘A World Undone’)

“The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; 
The times are winter, watch, a world undone: 
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run 
Or bring more or more blazon man's distress. 
And I not help. Nor word now of success:      
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—"—English Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), “The Times Are Nightfall, Look, Their Light Grows Less," in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges (1918)

I took the image accompanying this post—of a snow-covered Overpeck Park near nightfall in Bergen County, NJ—in December 2020.

Quote of the Day (Gerard Manley Hopkins, on How ‘Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places’)

"As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

“I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.” —English Roman Catholic priest and poet  Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

Quote of the Day (Gerard Manley Hopkins, on Violence, Insolence and Pride)

“Violence is admired and, above all, insolence and pride. But it is our baseness to admire anything evil. It seems to me we should in everything side with virtue, even if we do not feel its charm." —English Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), letter to English poet-critic Coventry Patmore, Sept. 12, 1883, in A Hopkins Reader, selected by John Pick (1953)

Quote of the Day (Gerard Manley Hopkins, on “God, Lover of Souls’)

“God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,

Complete thy creature dear O where it fails,

   Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.”-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “In the Valley of the Elwy,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, edited by W.H. Gardener (Penguin Classics, 1985)

Quote of the Day (Gerard Manley Hopkins, on the “Bright Wings” of God)

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; pop
And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” from Poems (1918)

I took the image accompanying this post four years ago one morning from the shores of Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York.