“The busy fingers fly, the eyes may see
Only the glancing needle which they hold,
But all my life is blossoming inwardly,
And every breath is like a litany;
While through each labor like a thread of gold
Is woven the sweet conscious of thee!”
There is a great deal more in life’s common task-work than we dream. We think of it oftentimes as the dreariest kind of drudgery. Many a man never learns to go to his daily toil with hearty enthusiasm. Many a woman never goes through her household duties but with a weary heart and a feeling of constraint. It is this dullness of life’s common tasks that makes them seem so hard. If people loved them and took them up with delight, they would be light and easy, for love makes anything easy. It is the dreariness of this unending plod and grind that wears out so many lives, not the real burden of it. People are fretted and become discontented, as they must go every day over and over the same routine. It seems so idle. Nothing comes of it. It is weaving ever only to have the web un-woven.
“O trifling tasks so often done,
Yet ever to be done anew!
O cares that come with every sun,
Morn after morn the long years through!
We shrink beneath their paltry away–
The irksome calls of every day.
The restless sense of wasted power,
The tiresome round of little things,
Are hard to bear, as hour by hour,
Its tedious iteration brings;
Who shall evade, or who delay,
The small demands of every day?”
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