Pages from Bessie Morgan Rex's scrapbook.

Bessie Morgan Rex (1891-1938)
I’m going to thumb through some of Bessie Morgan Rex’s scrapbook pages. This scrapbook was lost to our family until about 2009 when Aunt Flora Rex Lamborn was going through some things, it surfaced, and she lent it to me for a few days.

I copied some of her clippings and thoughts.

SHINE WHERE YOU ARE

“Don’t waste your time in longing
For bright impossible things;
Don’t sit supinely yearning
For the swiftness of angel wings;
Don’t spurn to be a rushlight
Because you are not a star;
But brighten some bit of darkness
By shining just where you are.
There is need of the tiniest candle,
As well as the garish sun;
The humblest deed is ennobled
When it is worthily done;
You may never be called to brighten
The darkest regions afar;
So fill, for the day, your mission
By shining just where you are.”

Take time to speak a loving word
Where loving words are seldom heard;
And it will linger in the mind,
And gather others of its kind,
Till loving words will echo where
Erstwhile the heart was poor and bare;
And sometime on the heavenward track
Their music will come echoing back.

The only way to have a friend is to be one. –Emerson

Grandmother Bessie may have clipped and included the following poem in her scrapbook because her mother’s name was Helen Melvina, and her first daughter was named Helen.

Poems I Love by Charles Hansen Towne
“To Helen,” by Edgar Allen Poe
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, O’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs, have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! In your brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land! (copyright 1926)

Barton wrote this short piece, "There are Two Seas" for McCall's in 1928.

There Are Two Seas by Bruce BartonThere are two seas in Palestine.
One is fresh, and fish are in it. Splashes of green adorn its banks. Trees spread their branches over it and stretch out their thirsty roots to sip of its healing waters.

Along its shores the children play as children played when He was there. He loved it. He could look across its silver surface when He spoke His parables. And on a rolling plain not far away He fed five thousand people.

The river Jordan makes this sea with sparkling water from the hills. So it laughs in the sunshine. And men build their houses near to it, and birds their nests; and every kind of life is happier because it is there.

The river Jordan flows on south into another sea.

Here no splash of fish, no fluttering of leaf, no song of birds, no children's laughter. Travelers choose another route, unless on urgent business. The air hangs heavy above its water, and neither man nor beast nor fowl will drink.

What makes this mighty difference in these neighbor seas? Not the river Jordan. It empties the same good water into both. Not the soil in which they lie; not the country round about.

This is the difference. The Sea of Galilee receives but does not keep the Jordan. For every drop that flows into it another drop flows out. The giving and receiving go on in equal measure.

The other sea is shrewder, hoarding its income jealously. It will not be tempted into any generous impulse. Every drop it gets, it keeps.

The Sea of Galilee gives and lives. The other sea gives nothing. It is named The Dead.

There are two kinds of people in the world. There are two seas in Palestine.

Several scrapbook pages were filled with chapters from “The Life of Our Lord” by Charles Dickens. The book was first published in 1834. Sometime during the 1920-30’s it appeared in installments in the Salt Lake Tribune. President Gordon B. Hinckley quoted from this book in general conference.