exercised whatever happens--either patience or thanksgiving, love or
fear, moderation or humility, charity or contentedness.

Or, take this from Samuel Johnson:--

The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind; and he who has
so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing
anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless
efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.

Now, to be frank, I do not call that first passage very good prose. Like
much of Jeremy Taylor's writing it is prose tricked out with the
trappings and odds-and-ends of verse. It starts off, for example, with a
brace of heroics--'Since all the evil in the world consists'...'between
the object and the appetite.' You may say, further, that the simile of
the wheel, though proper enough to prose, is poetical too: that Homer
might have used it ('As in a wheel the rim turns violently, while the
nave, though it turns also, yet seems to be at rest'--something of that
sort). Nevertheless you will agree with me that, in exchanging
Wordsworth for Taylor and Johnson, we have relaxed something with the
metre, something that the metre kept taut; and this something we
discover to be the emotional pitch.

But let me give you another illustration, supplied (I dare say quite
unconsciously) by one who combined a genuine love of verse--in which,
however, he was no adept--with a sure instinct for beautiful prose.
Contentment was a favourite theme with Isaak Walton: "The Compleat
Angler" is packed with praise of it: and in "The Compleat Angler" occurs
this well-known passage:--