Thrice-golden gifts

"So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear - floods, nor sigh - tempests move,
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love." John Donne

"But none can approach the incomparable variety of wild beauty that is the heritage of this land - with its Yosemite, its Niagara, its Grand Canyon, its Old Faithful, its Carlsbad Cavern, its timberline gardens and deserts bursting into bloom, its Olympic forests and its ancient sequoias, its snow-clad peaks and all the teeming bird life of its coastal swamps. This gift of natural beauty is a rare and precious possession." Edwin Way Teale

"For the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost any thing - force, violence, murder, lying - is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end ... I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God." Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.