Meaning & Analysis
To regain courage and good cheer; to recover one’s nerve and proceed with confidence.
Insights
Renewed Courage
After fear or setback, one ‘takes heart’—summoning inner steadiness and facing the matter with fresh boldness.
Assisted Fortitude
The word ‘grace’ hints that courage can be gifted—by providence, friends, or circumstance—so bravery is both chosen and received.
Turning Point
Marks the hinge from despondency to action: a decision to stop sinking and to re-enter the fray with uplifted spirit.
License to Hope
Signals that the worst is past or bearable; hope becomes rational, and the heart is authorized to rise.
Variant Forms
Early attestations show lively variants—‘heart of grace,’ ‘heart at grass,’ even ‘hart of grease’—a tangle of spellings whose meanings converge on ‘take courage again.’ The stable sense outlives the orthography.
Religious Overtone
‘Grace’ imports a devotional resonance: courage as a gift beyond mere willpower, aligning the phrase with prayers for strengthening in trial.
Folk Etymologies
The proximity of heart/hart (deer) and grace/grass/grease bred playful mishearings. Whatever the punning pathway, usage fixed the idiom as a call to brave cheer.
Psychology of Rebound
The proverb names a familiar pivot: reappraisal reduces threat, breath steadies, and action resumes—a miniature map of resilience.
Social Encouragement
Often spoken to others, it functions as communal morale—one voice lending another the confidence to proceed.
Rhetorical Devices
Imperative
A brisk command that performs reassurance and imparts momentum to the hearer.
Metaphor
Treats courage as something one can ‘take’ or receive, turning an inner shift into a tangible action.
Paronomasia
Historical play among heart/hart and grace/grass/grease gives the idiom a punning, memorable texture.
Alliteration
The soft h/g consonants (‘heart,’ ‘grace’) lend a gentle lift that suits the counsel to cheer up.
Aphoristic Compression
Compact phrasing distills a full recovery arc—fear, turning, courage—into a portable cue.
Transcription
Quotations
They lyved a great whyle lyke cowardes, but at the laste they toke herte a gresse to them.
She taketh such hert of gras that though I maym hir, Or kill hir, yet shall I neuer reclaym hir.
It is now high time to take hart of grease unto them.
And beying aboute somewhat to haue written vnto him, whereby he mighte haue taken hartie grace.
Goe to Gentleman, take heart at grasse, for your evill is easie to bee cured.
She.. tooke harte at grasse, and woulde needes trie a newe conclusion.
To take heart of grace or courage againe.
He taketh heart at grasse.
Take heart of grace.
Come, come take Heart of Grace.
Take Heart of Grace.
Cross References
Annotations
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.