One for Sorrow Read Online Free Page A

included in the physician Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia : ‘We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.’
    The different forms of words do nothing to alter the lesson the phrase teaches, which is to be grateful for all that we have, since we often take the sources of our sustenance for granted until they are suddenly removed and their true value becomes evident.
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The darkest hour is that before the dawn
    This proverb may be most recognizable to today’s readers as a song lyric; it appears in Bob Dylan’s ‘Meet Me in the Morning’, along with a number of American folksongs, and is the title of the Stanley Brothers country ballad made famous by Emmy-Lou Harris.
    It appears to have been printed for the first time in 1650 in A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof – a book on biblical history by the English author and churchman Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), which includes the line:

    It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.

    Fuller was a contemporary of Milton and a theologian, but there is no suggestion that this phrase comes from religious texts. Its origins may in fact be in Gaelic mythology, which often wasn’t recorded until long after it had become folklore. In 1858 Irish painter and songwriter Samuel Lover, who wrote two books on rural life in Ireland, noted in his Songs and Ballads of 1839:

    There is a beautiful saying amongst the Irish peasantry to inspire hope under adverse circumstances: ‘Remember , ’ they say, ‘that the darkest hour of all, is the hour before day.’

    Unlike many country proverbs there is no scientific foundation for the phrase when it’s taken literally – darkness doesn’t intensify in the hour before the sunrise, though in contrast to daybreak it may have seemed as if it did. When taken metaphorically, however, it is little more than a truism – when matters cannot get any worse – any darker – they have to start getting better. We still use the phrase to encourage optimism in times of hardship or to comfort people who are in despair.

When the cat’s away the mice will play
    Though its exact provenance is unknown, this phrase is believed to have its roots in early Rome since it existed first in Latin. The original version reads:

    Dum felis dormit, mus gaudet et exsilit antro. (‘When the cat falls asleep, the mouse rejoices and leaps from the hole . ’ )

    In early fourteenth-century France the rat had displaced the mouse: ‘ Ou chat na rat regne ’ – ‘Where there is no cat, the rat is king.’ This version gives the best clue to the original meaning, which referred to the rebellious behaviour of the people when their king or ruler was absent for too long. (The mice danced back for the modern French version: ‘ Quand le chat n’est pas là, les souris dansent ’.)
    The saying existed in English round about 1470, collected in the eighteenth-century Harleian Miscellany or, A Collection of Scarce, Curious, And Entertaining Pamphlets And Tracts … : ‘The mows lordchypythe [rules] ther a cat ys nawt,’ meaning that people will misbehave if rules and leadership are lacking.
    By the time the Jacobean playwright Thomas Heywood’s domestic tragedy A Woman Killed with Kindness was printed in 1607, it was an established enough phrase for him to write: ‘There’s an old prouerbe, when the cats away, the mouse may play.’
    Heywood’s play was about adultery and in the context of his story of a husband’s betrayal by his guest and his wife, the phrase referred to infidelity behind the back of the master of the house. This is the way the phrase is often used today.
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Make hay while the sun shines
    A sixteenth-century proverb advocating action while circumstances are favourable, or seizing an opportunity. It appeared in John Heywood’s  Dialogue of