Explore "The Greater Love" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Hear thou my prayer, great God of opulence; / Give me no blessings, save as recompense / For blessings which I lovingly bestow / On needy stranger or on suffering foe. / If Wealth, by chance, should on my path appear, / Let Wisdom and Benevolence stand near, / And Charity within my portal wait, / To guard me from acquaintance intimate.
Yet in this intricate great art of living / Guide me away from misdirected giving, / And show me how to spur the laggard soul / To strive alone once more to gain the goal.
Repay my worldly efforts to attain / Only as I develop heart and brain; / Nor brand me with the ‘Dollar Sign' above / A bosom void of sympathy and love.
If on the carrying winds my name be blown / To any land or time beyond my own, / Let it not be as one who gained the day / By crowding others from the chosen way; / Rather as one who missed the highest place / Pausing to cheer spent runners in the race. / To do-to have-is lesser than to BE: / The greater boon I ask, dear God, from Thee.