Today we shall meet a famous
poetess Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Actually i met her in the 1st volume of New
Discoveries when she writes a letter to her friend Mrs Kate Tannat Woods. I
kept reading the passage where Swamiji talks about 'To do good for goods'
sake'. Then i met her again in Volume III when He comes to New York and
was fascinated to know about her husband whom she addressed as 'Man'.
They met Swamiji in New York and their life changed.
Swamiji started taking parlour
lectures at Dr. Guernsey's house after moving from Dr. Guernsey's house to His
new residence. It is here that Ell Wheeler Wilcox and 'Man' were drawn to the
lectures and met Swamiji.
Later in 1907 in her memoirs
she wrote:
Twelve years ago I chanced
one evening to hear that a certain teacher of philosophy from India, a man
named Vivekananda, was to lecture a block from my home in New York. We went out
of curiosity,… and before we had been ten minutes in the audience, we felt
ourselves lifted up into an atmosphere so rarefied, so vital, so wonderful,
that we sat spell - bound and almost breathless, to the end of the lecture.
When it was over we went
out with new courage, new hope, new strength, new faith, to meet life's daily
vicissitudes. "This is the Philosophy, this is the idea of God, the
religion which I have been seeking," said the Man. And for months
afterwards he went with me to hear Swami Vivekananda explain the old religion
and to gather from his wonderful mind jewels of truth and thoughts of helpfulness and
strength. It was that terrible winter of financial disasters, when banks failed
and stocks went down like broken balloons and business men walked through the
dark valleys of despair and the whole world seemed topsy - turvy.... Sometimes
after sleepless nights of worry and anxiety, the Man would go with me to hear
the Swami lecture, and then he would come out into the winter gloom and walk
down the street smiling and say, "It
is all right. There is nothing to worry over." And I would go back to my own
duties and pleasures with the same uplifted sense of soul and enlarged vision.
Later Ella Wheeler Wilcox
wrote about the lectures to her friend Mrs. Kate Tannatt Woods of Salem,
Massachusetts, who had been Swamiji's hostess before the Parliament. One of her
letters, dated "May, 1895," says:
I was listening to
Vivekananda this morning an hour. How honored by fate you must feel to have
been allowed to be of service to this Great Soul. I believe him to be the re -
incarnation of some great Spirit - perhaps Buddha - perhaps Christ. He is so
simple - so sincere, so pure, so unselfish. To have listened to him all winter
is the greatest privilege life has ever offered me. It would be surprising to
me that people could misunderstand or malign such a soul if I did not know how
Buddha and Christ were persecuted and lied about by small inferiors. His
discourse this morning was mat uplifting - his mere presence is that. His
absolute sinking of self is what I like. I am so tired of people who place the
capital "I" before truth - and God. "To
do good for good's sake"- with no expectation or desire of reward, and
never to speak of what we have done - but to keep on working for the love of
doing God's work - is Vivekananda's grand philosophy of life. He always makes me feel ashamed
that I have ever thought for one moment I was burdened or that I ever spoke of
any good act of my own.
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