"MAY 15, 19--
"This has been a lyric spring day--and a miracle has happened. It happened at dawn--when I was leaning out of my window, listening to a little, whispering, tricksy wind o' morning blowing out of Lofty John's bush. Suddenly--the flash came--again--after these long months of absence--my old, inexpressible glimpse of eternity. And all at once I knew I could write. I rushed to my desk and seized my pen. All the hours of early morning I wrote; and when I heard Cousin Jimmy going downstairs I flung down my pen and bowed my head over my desk in utter thankfulness that I could work again.
Get leave to work--
In this world 'tis the best you get at all,
For God in cursing gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction.
"So wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning--and truly. It is hard to understand why work should be called a curse--until one remembers what bitterness forced or uncongenial labour is. But the work for which we are fitted--which we feel we are sent into the world to do--what a blessing it is and what fullness of joy it holds. I felt this to-day as the old fever burned in my finger-tips and my pen once more seemed a friend.
"'Leave to work'--one would think any one could obtain so much. But sometimes anguish and heartbreak forbid us the leave. And then we realize what we have lost and know that it is better to be cursed by God than forgotten by Him. If He had punished Adam and Eve by sending them out to idleness, then indeed they would have been outcast and accursed. Not all the dreams of Eden 'whence the four great rivers flow' could have been as sweet as those I am dreaming to-night, because the power to work has come back to me.
"Oh, God, as long as I live give me 'leave to work.' Thus pray I. Leave and courage."
-L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest, Chapter XII
Great quotes! I get this feeling sometimes too :)
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