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Architects of Fate; Or, Steps to Success and Power

by Orison Swett Marden · English · Gutenberg #21622 · 594,257 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Architects of Fate; Or, Steps to Success and Power

Author: Orison Swett Marden


        
Release date: May 27, 2007 [eBook #21622]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Al Haines


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[Frontispiece: Phillips Brooks]

"The best-loved man in New England."

"The ideal life, the life full of completion, haunts us all.  We feel
the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are."

"_First, be a man._"






ARCHITECTS OF FATE

OR, STEPS TO SUCCESS AND POWER


  A BOOK DESIGNED TO INSPIRE YOUTH TO
  CHARACTER BUILDING, SELF-CULTURE
  AND NOBLE ACHIEVEMENT


BY

ORISON SWETT MARDEN



AUTHOR OF "PUSHING TO THE FRONT
  OR, SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES"



_ILLUSTRATED WITH SIXTEEN FINE
  PORTRAITS OF EMINENT PERSONS_



  "All are architects of fate
  Working in these walls of time."

  "Our to-days and yesterdays
  Are the blocks with which we build."

  "Let thy great deed be thy prayer to thy God."




TORONTO

WILLIAM BRIGGS

WESLEY BUILDINGS

MONTREAL: C. W. COATES

HALIFAX: S. F. HUESTIS

1897




Copyright, 1895,

BY ORISON SWETT MARDEN.


_All rights reserved._




PREFACE.

The demand for more than a dozen editions of "Pushing to the Front"
during its first year and its universally favorable reception, both at
home and abroad, have encouraged the author to publish this companion
volume of somewhat similar scope and purpose.  The two books were
prepared simultaneously, and the story of the first, given in its
preface, applies equally well to this.

Inspiration to character-building and worthy achievement is the keynote
of the present volume, its object, to arouse to honorable exertion
youth who are drifting without aim, to awaken dormant ambitions in
those who have grown discouraged in the struggle for success, to
encourage and stimulate to higher resolve those who are setting out to
make their own way, with perhaps neither friendship nor capital other
than a determination to get on in the world.

Nothing is so fascinating to a youth with high purpose, life, and
energy throbbing in his young blood as stories of men and women who
have brought great things to pass.  Though these themes are as old as
the human race, yet they are ever new, and more interesting to the
young than any fiction.  The cry of youth is for life! more life!  No
didactic or dogmatic teaching, however brilliant, will capture a
twentieth-century boy, keyed up to the highest pitch by the pressure of
an intense civilization.  The romance of achievement under
difficulties, of obscure beginnings and triumphant ends; the story of
how great men started, their struggles, their long waitings, amid want
and woe, the obstacles overcome, the final triumphs; examples, which
explode excuses, of men who have seized common situations and made them
great, of those of average capacity who have succeeded by the use of
ordinary means, by dint of indomitable will and inflexible purpose:
these will most inspire the ambitious youth.  The author teaches that
there are bread and success for every youth under the American flag who
has the grit to seize his chance and work his way to his own loaf; that
the barriers are not yet erected which declare to aspiring talent,
"Thus far and no farther"; that the most forbidding circumstances
cannot repress a longing for knowledge, a yearning for growth; that
poverty, humble birth, loss of limbs or even eyesight, have not been
able to bar the progress of men with grit; that poverty has rocked the
cradle of the giants who have wrung civilization from barbarism, and
have led the world up from savagery to the Gladstones, the Lincolns,
and the Grants.

The book shows that it is the man with one unwavering aim who cuts his
way through opposition and forges to the front; that in this electric
age, where everything is pusher or pushed, he who would succeed must
hold his ground and push hard; that what are stumbling-blocks and
defeats to the weak and vacillating, are but stepping-stones and
victories to the strong and determined.  The author teaches that every
germ of goodness will at last struggle into bloom and fruitage, and
that true success follows every right step.  He has tried to touch the
higher springs of the youth's aspiration; to lead him to high ideals;
to teach him that there is something nobler in an occupation than
merely living-getting or money-getting; that a man may make millions
and be a failure still; to caution youth not to allow the maxims of a
low prudence, dinned daily into his ears in this money-getting age, to
repress the longings for a higher life; that the hand can never safely
reach higher than does the heart.

The author's aim has been largely through concrete illustrations which
have pith, point, and purpose, to be more suggestive than dogmatic, in
a style more practical than elegant, more helpful than ornate, more
pertinent than novel.

The author wishes to acknowledge valuable assistance from Mr. Arthur W.
Brown, of W. Kingston, R. I.

O. S. M.

43 BOWDOIN ST., BOSTON, MASS.

December 2, 1896.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER

I.  WANTED--A MAN

God after a _man_.  Wealth is nothing, fame is nothing.  _Manhood is
everything_.

II.  DARE

Dare to live thy creed.  Conquer your place in the world.  All things
serve a brave soul.

III.  THE WILL AND THE WAY

Find a way or make one.  Everything is either pusher or pushed.  The
world always listens to a man with a will in him.

IV.  SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES

There is scarcely a great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its
way to recognition through detraction, calumny, and persecution.

V.  USES OR OBSTACLES

The Great Sculptor cares little for the human block as such; it is the
statue He is after; and He will blast, hammer, and chisel with poverty,
hardships, anything to get out the man.

VI.  ONE UNWAVERING AIM

Find your purpose and fling your life out to it.  Try to be somebody
with all your might.

VII.  SOWING AND REAPING

What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life.
_Start right_.

VIII.  SELF-HELP

Self-made or never made.  The greatest men have risen from the ranks.

IX.  WORK AND WAIT

Don't risk a life's superstructure upon a day's foundation.

X.  CLEAR GRIT

The goddess of fame or of fortune has been won by many a poor boy who
had no friends, no backing, or anything but pure grit and invincible
purpose to commend him.

XI.  THE GRANDEST THING IN THE WORLD

Manhood is above all riches and overtops all titles; character is
greater than any career.

XII.  WEALTH IN ECONOMY

"Hunger, rags, cold, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach,
are disagreeable; but debt is infinitely worse than all."

XIII.  RICH WITHOUT MONEY

To have nothing is not poverty.  Whoever uplifts civilization is rich
though he die penniless, and future generations will erect his monument.

XIV.  OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE

"How speaks the present hour?  _Act_."  Don't wait for great
opportunities.  _Seize common occasions and make them great_.

XV.  THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS

There is nothing small in a world where a mud-crack swells to an
Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold.

XVI.  SELF-MASTERY

Guard your weak point.  Be lord over yourself.




LIST OF PORTRAITS.


CHAP.

    I. Phillips Brooks . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
   II. Oliver Hazard Perry
  III. Walter Scott
   IV. William Hickling Prescott
    V. John Bunyan
   VI. Richard Arkwright
  VII. Victor Hugo
 VIII. James A. Garfield (missing from book)
   IX. Thomas Alva Edison
    X. Andrew Jackson
   XI. John Greenleaf Whittier (missing from book)
  XII. Alexander Hamilton
 XIII. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  XIV. Thomas Jefferson
   XV. Louis Agassiz
  XVI. James Russell Lowell




ARCHITECTS OF FATE.


CHAPTER I.

WANTED--A MAN.

  "Wanted; men:
  Not systems fit and wise,
  Not faiths with rigid eyes,
  Not wealth in mountain piles,
  Not power with gracious smiles,
  Not even the potent pen:
  Wanted; men."

Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and
know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a
man.--JEREMIAH.

All the world cries, Where is the man who will save us?  We want a man!
Don't look so far for this man.  You have him at hand.  This man,--it
is you, it is I, it is each one of us! . . .  How to constitute one's
self a man?  Nothing harder, if one knows not how to will it; nothing
easier, if one wills it.--ALEXANDRE DUMAS.

  "'Tis life, not death for which we pant!
  'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant:
  More life and fuller, that we want."

I do not wish in attempting to paint a man to describe an air-fed,
unimpassioned, impossible ghost.  My eyes and ears are revolted by any
neglect of the physical facts, the limitations of man.--EMERSON.

  But nature, with a matchless hand, sends forth her nobly born,
  And laughs the paltry attributes of wealth and rank to scorn;
  She moulds with care a spirit rare, half human, half divine,
  And cries exulting, "Who can make a gentleman like mine?"
        ELIZA COOK.


"In a thousand cups of life," says Emerson, "only one is the right
mixture.  The fine adjustment of the existing elements, where the
well-mixed man is born with eyes not too dull, nor too good, with fire
enough and earth enough, capable of receiving impressions from all
things, and not too susceptible, then no gift need be bestowed on him.
He brings his fortune with him."

Diogenes sought with a lantern at noontide in ancient Athens for a
perfectly honest man, and sought in vain.  In the market place he once
cried aloud, "Hear me, O men;" and, when a crowd collected around him,
he said scornfully: "I called for men, not pygmies."

The world has a standing advertisement over the door of every
profession, every occupation, every calling; "Wanted--A Man."

Wanted, a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who
has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say "No,"
though all the world say "Yes."

Wanted, a man who, though he is dominated by a mighty purpose, will not
permit one great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his
manhood; who will not allow the over-development of one facility to
stunt or paralyze his other faculties.

Wanted, a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low
estimate of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a
living.  Wanted, a man who sees self-development, education and
culture, discipline and drill, character and manhood, in his occupation.

A thousand pulpits vacant in a single religious denomination, a
thousand preachers standing idle in the market place, while a thousand
church committees scour the land for men to fill those same vacant
pulpits, and scour in vain, is a sufficient indication, in one
direction at least, of the largeness of the opportunities of the age,
and also of the crying need of good men.

Wanted, a man who is well balanced, who is not cursed with some little
defect or weakness which cripples his usefulness and neutralizes his
powers.  Wanted, a man of courage, who is not a coward in any part of
his nature.

Wanted, a man who is symmetrical, and not one-sided in his development,
who has not sent all the energies of his being into one narrow
specialty, and allowed all the other branches of his life to wither and
die.  Wanted, a man who is broad, who does not take half views of
things.  Wanted, a man who mixes common sense with his theories, who
does not let a college education spoil him for practical, every-day
life; a man who prefers substance to show, who regards his good name as
a priceless treasure.

Wanted, a man "who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but
whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a
tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of
nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as
himself."

God calls a man to be upright and pure and generous, but he also calls
him to be intelligent and skillful and strong and brave.

The world wants a man who is educated all over; whose nerves are
brought to their acutest sensibility, whose brain is cultured, keen,
incisive, penetrating, broad, liberal, deep; whose hands are deft;
whose eyes are alert, sensitive, microscopic, whose heart is tender,
broad, magnanimous, true.

The whole world is looking for such a man.  Although there are millions
out of employment, yet it is almost impossible to find just the right
man in almost any department of life.  Every profession and every
occupation has a standing advertisement all over the world: "Wanted--A
Man."

Rousseau, in his celebrated essay on education, says: "According to the
order of nature, men being equal, their common vocation is the
profession of humanity; and whoever is well educated to discharge the
duty of a man cannot be badly prepared to fill any of those offices
that have a relation to him.  It matters little to me whether my pupil
be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar.  Nature has destined
us to the offices of human life antecedent to our destination
concerning society.  To live is the profession I would teach him.  When
I have done with him, it is true he will be neither a soldier, a
lawyer, nor a divine.  _Let him first be a man_; Fortune may remove him
from one rank to another as she pleases, he will be always found in his
place."

A little, short doctor of divinity in a large Baptist convention stood
on a step and said he thanked God he was a Baptist.  The audience could
not hear and called "Louder."  "Get up higher," some one said.  "I
can't," he replied.  "To be a Baptist is as high as one can get."  But
there is something higher than being a Baptist, and that is being a
_man_.

As Emerson says, Talleyrand's question is ever the main one; not, is he
rich? is he committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty?
is he of the movement? is he of the establishment? but is he anybody?
does he stand for something?  He must be good of his kind.  That is all
that Talleyrand, all that State Street, all that the common sense of
mankind asks.

When Garfield was asked as a young boy, "what he meant to be," he
answered: "First of all, I must make myself a man, if I do not succeed
in that, I can succeed in nothing."

Montaigne says our work is not to train a soul by itself alone, nor a
body by itself alone, but to train a man.

One great need of the world to-day is for men and women who are good
animals.  To endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the
coming man and woman must have an excess of animal spirits.  They must
have a robustness of health.  Mere absence of disease is not health.
It is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives life
and beauty to the valley below.  Only he is healthy who exults in mere
animal existence; whose very life is a luxury; who feels a bounding
pulse throughout his body, who feels life in every limb, as dogs do
when scouring over the field, or as boys do when gliding over fields of
ice.

Pope, the poet, was with Sir Godfrey Kneller, the artist, one day, when
the latter's nephew, a Guinea slave-trader, came into the room.
"Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two
greatest men in the world."  "I don't know how great men you may be,"
said the Guinea man, "but I don't like your looks.  I have often bought
a much better man than either of you, all muscles and bones, for ten
guineas."

Sydney Smith said, "I am convinced that digestion is the great secret
of life, and that character, virtue and talents, and qualities are
powerfully affected by beef, mutton, pie crust, and rich soups.  I have
often thought I could feed or starve men into virtues or vices, and
affect them more powerfully with my instruments of torture than
Timotheus could do formerly with his lyre."

What more glorious than a magnificent manhood, animated with the
bounding spirits of overflowing health?

It is a sad sight to see thousands of students graduated every year
from our grand institutions, whose object is to make stalwart,
independent, self-supporting men, turned out into the world saplings
instead of stalwart oaks, "memory-glands" instead of brainy men,
helpless instead of self-supporting, sickly instead of robust, weak
instead of strong, leaning instead of erect.  "So many promising
youths, and never a finished man!"

The character sympathizes with and unconsciously takes on the nature of
the body.  A peevish, snarling, ailing man cannot develop the vigor and
strength of character which is possible to a healthy, robust, jolly
man.  There is an inherent love in the human mind for wholeness, a
demand that man shall come up to the highest standard; and there is an
inherent protest or contempt for preventable deficiency.  Nature too
demands that man be ever at the top of his condition.  The giant's
strength with the imbecile's brain will not be characteristic of the
coming man.

Man has been a dwarf of himself, but a higher type of manhood stands at
the door of this age knocking for admission.

As we stand upon the seashore while the tide is coming in, one wave
reaches up the beach far higher than any previous one, then recedes,
and for some time none that follows comes up to its mark, but after a
while the whole sea is there and beyond it, so now and then there comes
a man head and shoulders above his fellow-men, showing that Nature has
not lost her ideal, and after a while even the average man will overtop
the highest wave of manhood yet given to the world.

Apelles hunted over Greece for many years, studying the fairest points
of beautiful women, getting here an eye, there a forehead and there a
nose, here a grace and there a turn of beauty, for his famous portrait
of a perfect woman which enchanted the world.  So the coming man will
be a composite, many in one.  He will absorb into himself not the
weakness, not the follies, but the strength and the virtues of other
types of men.  He will be a man raised to the highest power.  He will
be self-centred, equipoised, and ever master of himself.  His
sensibility will not be deadened or blunted by violation of nature's
laws.  His whole character will be impressible, and will respond to the
most delicate touches of nature.

What a piece of work--this coming man!  "How noble in reason.  How
infinite in faculties.  In form and motion how express and admirable,
in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.  The
beauty of the world.  The paragon of animals."

The first requisite of all education and discipline should be
man-timber.  Tough timber must come from well grown, sturdy trees.
Such wood can be turned into a mast, can be fashioned into a piano or
an exquisite carving.  But it must become timber first.  Time and
patience develop the sapling into the tree.  So through discipline,
education, experience, the sapling child is developed into hardy
mental, moral, physical timber.

What an aid to character building would be the determination of the
young man in starting out in life to consider himself his own bank;
that his notes will be accepted as good or bad, and will pass current
everywhere or be worthless, according to his individual reputation for
honor and veracity; that if he lets a note go to protest, his bank of
character will be suspected; if he lets two or three go to protest,
public confidence will be seriously shaken; that if they continue to go
to protest, his reputation will be lost and confidence in him ruined.

If the youth should start out with the fixed determination that every
statement he makes shall be the exact truth; that every promise he
makes shall be redeemed to the letter; that every appointment shall be
kept with the strictest faithfulness and with full regard for other
men's time, if he should hold his reputation as a priceless treasure,
feel that the eyes of the world are upon him, that he must not deviate
a hair's breadth from the truth and right; if he should take such a
stand at the outset, he would, like George Peabody, come to have almost
unlimited credit and the confidence of all, and would have developed
into noble man-timber.

What are palaces and equipages; what though a man could cover a
continent with his title-deeds, or an ocean with his commerce, compared
with conscious rectitude, with a face that never turns pale at the
accuser's voice, with a bosom that never throbs with the fear of
exposure, with a heart that might be turned inside out and disclose no
stain of dishonor?  To have done no man a wrong; to have put your
signature to no paper to which the purest angel in heaven might not
have been an attesting witness; to walk and live, unseduced, within
arm's length of what is not your own, with nothing between your desire
and its gratification but the invisible law of rectitude;--_this is to
be a man_.

  "He that of such a height hath built his mind,
  And reared the dwelling of his thought so strong
  As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
  Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind
  Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
  His settled peace, or to disturb the same;
  What a fair seat hath he; from whence he may
  The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey."
    [_Lines found in one of the books of Beecher's Library._]

A man is never so happy as when he is _totus in se_; as when he
suffices to himself, and can walk without crutches or a guide.  Said
Jean Paul Richter: "I have made as much out of myself as could be made
of the stuff, and no man should require more."

Man is the only great thing in the universe.  All the ages have been
trying to produce a perfect model.  Only one complete man has yet been
evolved.  The best of us are but prophecies of what is to come.

    What constitutes a state?
  Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,
    Thick wall or moated gate;
  Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned;
    Not bays and broad-armed ports,
  Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride;
    Not starred and spangled courts,
  Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride.
    No: men, high-minded men,
  With powers as far above dull brutes endued
    In forest, brake, or den,
  As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude,--
    Men who their duties know,
  But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain,
    Prevent the long-aimed blow,
  And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain.
        WILLIAM JONES.

  God give us men.  A time like this demands
  Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands:
  Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
  Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
  Men who possess opinions and a will;
  Men who have honor--men who will not lie;
  Men who can stand before a demagogue
  And scorn his treacherous flatteries without winking;
  Tall men sun-crowned, who live above the fog
  In public duty, and in private thinking.
        ANON.

  Open thy bosom, set thy wishes wide,
  And let in manhood--let in happiness;
  Admit the boundless theatre of thought
  From nothing up to God . . . which makes a man!
        YOUNG.

  "The wisest man could ask no more of fate
  Than to be simple, modest, manly, true."

  In speech right gentle, yet so wise; princely of mien,
  Yet softly mannered; modest, deferent,
  And tender-hearted, though of fearless blood.
        EDWIN ARNOLD.




CHAPTER II.

DARE.

The Spartans did not inquire how many the enemy are, but where they
are.--AGIS II.

What's brave, what's noble, let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
and make death proud to take us.--SHAKESPEARE.

  Better, like Hector, in the field to die,
  Than, like a perfumed Paris, turn and fly.
        LONGFELLOW.

Let me die facing the enemy.--BAYARD.

Who conquers me, shall find a stubborn foe.--BYRON.

Courage in danger is half the battle.--PLAUTUS.

  No great deed is done
  By falterers who ask for certainty.
        GEORGE ELIOT.

Fortune befriends the bold.--DRYDEN.

  Tender handed stroke a nettle,
    And it stings you for your pains;
  Grasp it like a man of mettle,
    And it soft as silk remains.
        AARON HILL.

We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.--BOVÉE.

  Man should dare all things that he knows is right,
  And fear to do nothing save what is wrong.
        PHEBE CARY.

  Soft-heartedness, in times like these,
  Shows softness in the upper story.
        LOWELL.

O friend, never strike sail to fear.  Come into port grandly, or sail
with God the seas.--EMERSON.

To stand with a smile upon your face against a stake from which you
cannot get away--that, no doubt, is heroic.  But the true glory is
resignation to the inevitable.  To stand unchained, with perfect
liberty to go away, held only by the higher claims of duty, and let the
fire creep up to the heart,--this is heroism.--F. W. ROBERTSON.


"Steady, men!  Every man must die where he stands!" said Colin Campbell
to the Ninety-third Highlanders at Balaklava, as an overwhelming force
of Russian cavalry came sweeping down.  "Ay, ay, Sir Colin! we'll do
that!" was the cordial response from men many of whom had to keep their
word by thus obeying.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

[Illustration: COMMODORE PERRY]

"We have met the enemy and they are ours."

  "He either fears his fate too much
    Or his deserts too small,
  That dares not put it to the touch,
    To gain or lose it all."

      *      *      *      *      *      *

"Bring back the colors," shouted a captain at the battle of the Alma,
when an ensign maintained his ground in front, although the men were
retreating.  "No," cried the ensign, "bring up the men to the colors."
"To dare, and again to dare, and without end to dare," was Danton's
noble defiance to the enemies of France.

"The Commons of France have resolved to deliberate," said Mirabeau to
De Breze, who brought an order from the king for them to disperse, June
23, 1789.  "We have heard the intentions that have been attributed to
the king; and you, sir, who cannot be recognized as his organ in the
National Assembly,--you, who have neither place, voice, nor right to
speak,--you are not the person to bring to us a message of his.  Go,
say to those who sent you that we are here by the power of the people,
and that we will not be driven hence, save by the power of the bayonet."

When the assembled senate of Rome begged Regulus not to return to
Carthage to fulfill an illegal promise, he calmly replied: "Have you
resolved to dishonor me?  Torture and death are awaiting me, but what
are these to the shame of an infamous act, or the wounds of a guilty
mind?  Slave as I am to Carthage, I still have the spirit of a Roman.
I have sworn to return.  It is my duty.  Let the gods take care of the
rest."

The courage which Cranmer had shown since the accession of Mary gave
way the moment his final doom was announced.  The moral cowardice which
had displayed itself in his miserable compliance with the lust and
despotism of Henry displayed itself again in six successive
recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon.  But pardon was
impossible; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found a power in its
very weakness when he was brought into the church of St. Mary at Oxford
on the 21st of March, to repeat his recantation on the way to the
stake.  "Now," ended his address to the hushed congregation before
him,--"now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more
than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that is
the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth; which here I now
renounce and refuse as things written by a hand contrary to the truth
which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death to save my
life, if it might be.  And, forasmuch as my hand offended in writing
contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the first punished;
for if I come to the fire it shall be the first burned."  "This was the
hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the stake, "therefore it
shall suffer first punishment;" and holding it steadily in the flame,
"he never stirred nor cried till life was gone."

"Oh, if I were only a man!" exclaimed Rebecca Bates, a girl of
fourteen, as she looked from the window of a lighthouse at Scituate,
Mass., during the War of 1812, and saw a British warship anchor in the
harbor.  "What could you do?" asked Sarah Winsor, a young visitor.
"See what a lot of them the boats contain, and look at their guns!" and
she pointed to five large boats, filled with soldiers in scarlet
uniforms, who were coming to burn the vessels in the harbor and destroy
the town.  "I don't care, I'd fight," said Rebecca.  "I'd use father's
old shotgun--anything.  Think of uncle's new boat and the sloop!  And
how hard it is to sit here and see it all, and not lift a finger to
help.  Father and uncle are in the village and will do all they can.
How still it is in the town!  There is not a man to be seen."  "Oh,
they are hiding till the soldiers get nearer," said Sarah, "then we'll
hear the shots and the drum."  "The drum!" exclaimed Rebecca, "how can
they use it?  It is here.  Father brought it home last night to mend.
See! the first boat has reached the sloop.  Oh! they are going to burn
her.  Where is that drum?  I've a great mind to go down and beat it.
We could hide behind the sandhills and bushes."  As flames began to
rise from the sloop the ardor of the girls increased.  They found the
drum and an old fife, and, slipping out of doors unnoticed by Mrs.
Bates, soon stood behind a row of sandhills.  "Rub-a-dub-dub,
rub-a-dub-dub," went the drum, and "squeak, squeak, squeak," went the
fife.  The Americans in the town thought that help had come from
Boston, and rushed into boats to attack the redcoats.  The British
paused in their work of destruction; and, when the fife began to play
"Yankee Doodle," they scrambled into their boats and rowed in haste to
the warship, which weighed anchor and sailed away as fast as the wind
would carry her.

A woman's piercing shriek suddenly startled a party of surveyors at
dinner in a forest of northern Virginia on a calm, sunny day in 1750.
The cries were repeated in quick succession, and the men sprang through
the undergrowth to learn their cause.  "Oh, sir," exclaimed the woman
as she caught sight of a youth of eighteen, but a man in stature and
bearing; "you will surely do something for me!  Make these friends
release me.  My boy,--my poor boy is drowning, and they will not let me
go!"  "It would be madness; she will jump into the river," said one of
the men who was holding her; "and the rapids would dash her to pieces
in a moment!"  Throwing on his coat, the youth sprang to the edge of
the bank, scanned for a moment the rocks and whirling currents, and
then, at sight of part of the boy's dress, plunged into the roaring
rapids.  "Thank God, he will save my child!" cried the mother, and all
rushed to the brink of the precipice; "there he is!  Oh, my boy, my
darling boy!  How could I leave you?"

But all eyes were bent upon the youth struggling with strong heart and
hope amid the dizzy sweep of the whirling currents far below.  Now it
seemed as if he would be dashed against a projecting rock, over which
the water flew in foam, and anon a whirlpool would drag him in, from
whose grasp escape would seem impossible.  Twice the boy went out of
sight, but he had reappeared the second time, although frightfully near
the most dangerous part of the river.  The rush of waters here was
tremendous, and no one had ever dared to approach it, even in a canoe,
lest he should be dashed to pieces.  The youth redoubled his exertions.
Three times he was about to grasp the child, when some stronger eddy
would toss it from him.  One final effort he makes; the child is held
aloft by his strong right arm, but a cry of horror bursts from the lips
of every spectator as boy and man shoot over the falls and vanish in
the seething waters below.

"There they are!" shouted the mother a moment later, in a delirium of
joy.  "See! they are safe!  Great God, I thank Thee!"  And sure enough
they emerged unharmed from the boiling vortex, and in a few minutes
reached a low place in the bank and were drawn up by their friends, the
boy senseless, but still alive, and the youth almost exhausted.  "God
will give you a reward," solemnly spoke the grateful woman.  "He will
do great things for you in return for this day's work, and the
blessings of thousands besides mine will attend you."

The youth was George Washington.

"Your Grace has not the organ of animal courage largely developed,"
said a phrenologist, who was examining Wellington's head.  "You are
right," replied the Iron Duke, "and but for my sense of duty I should
have retreated in my first fight."  That first fight, on an Indian
field, was one of the most terrible on record.

In the reverses which followed Napoleon, he met the allies at Arcis.  A
live shell having fallen in front of one of his young battalions, which
recoiled and wavered in expectation of an explosion, Napoleon, to
reassure them, spurred his charger toward the instrument of
destruction, made him smell the burning match, waited unshaken for the
explosion, and was blown up.  Rolling in the dust with his mutilated
steed, and rising without a wound amid the plaudits of his soldiers, he
calmly called for another horse, and continued to brave the grape-shot,
and to fly into the thickest of the battle.

When General Jackson was a judge and was holding court in a small
settlement, a border ruffian, a murderer and desperado, came into the
court-room with brutal violence and interrupted the court.  The judge
ordered him to be arrested.  The officer did not dare to approach him.
"Call a posse," said the judge, "and arrest him."  But they also shrank
in fear from the ruffian.  "Call me, then," said Jackson; "this court
is adjourned for five minutes."  He left the bench, walked straight up
to the man, and with his eagle eye actually cowed the ruffian, who
dropped his weapons, afterwards saying, "There was something in his eye
I could not resist."

One of the last official acts of the late President Carnot, of France,
was the sending of a medal of the French Legion of Honor to a little
American girl, who lives in Indiana.  While a train on the Pan Handle
Railroad, having on board several distinguished Frenchmen, was bound to
Chicago and the World's Fair, Jennie Carey, who was then ten years old,
discovered that a trestle was on fire, and that if the train, which was
nearly due, entered it a dreadful wreck would take place.  Thereupon
she ran out upon the track to a place where she could be seen from some
little distance.  Then she took off her red flannel skirt and, when the
train came in view, waved it back and forth across the track.  It was
seen, and the train stopped.  On board of it were seven hundred people,
many of whom must have suffered death but for Jennie's courage and
presence of mind.  When they returned to France, the Frenchmen brought
the occurrence to the notice of President Carnot, and the result was
the sending of the medal of this famous French society, the purpose of
which is the honoring of bravery and merit, wherever they may be found.

After the battle of Fort Donelson, the wounded were hauled down the
hill in rough board wagons, and most of them died before they reached
St. Louis.  One blue-eyed boy of nineteen, with both arms and both legs
shattered, had lain a long time and was neglected.  He said, "Why, you
see they couldn't stop to bother with us because they had to take the
fort.  When they took it we all forgot our sufferings and shouted for
joy, even to the dying."

Louis IX. of France was captured by the Turks at the battle of
Mansoora, during the Seventh Crusade, and his wife Marguerite, with a
babe at the breast, was in Damietta, many miles away.  The Infidels
surrounded the city, and pressed the garrison so hard that it was
decided to capitulate.  The queen summoned the knights, and told them
that she at least would die in armor upon the ramparts before the enemy
should become masters of Damietta.

  "Before her words they thrilled like leaves
    When winds are in the wood;
  And a deepening murmur told of men
    Roused to a loftier mood."


Grasping lance and shield, they vowed to defend their queen and the
cross to the last.  Damietta was saved.

Pyrrhus marched to Sparta to reinstate the deposed Cleonymus, and
quietly pitched his tents before Laconia, not anticipating resistance.
In consternation, the Spartans in council decided to send their women
to Crete for safety.  But the women met and asked Queen Archidamia to
remonstrate.  She went to the council, sword in hand, and told the men
that their wives did not care to live after Sparta was destroyed.

  "We are brave men's mothers, and brave men's wives;
    We are ready to do and dare;
  We are ready to man your walls with our lives,
    And string your bows with our hair."


They hurried to the walls and worked all night, aiding the men in
digging trenches.  When Pyrrhus attacked the city next day, his repulse
was so emphatic that he withdrew from Laconia.

Charles V. of Spain passed through Thuringia in 1547, on his return to
Swabia after the battle of Muehlburg.  He wrote to Catherine, Countess
Dowager of Schwartzburg, promising that her subjects should not be
molested in their persons or property if they would supply the Spanish
soldiers with provisions at a reasonable price.  On approaching
Eudolstadt, General Alva and Prince Henry of Brunswick, with his sons,
invited themselves, by a messenger sent forward, to breakfast with the
Countess, who had no choice but to ratify so delicate a request from
the commander of an army.  Just as the guests were seated at a generous
repast, the Countess was called from the hall and told that the
Spaniards were using violence and driving away the cattle of the
peasants.

Quietly arming all her retinue, she bolted and barred all the gates and
doors of the castle, and returned to the banquet to complain of the
breach of faith.  General Alva told her that such was the custom of
war, adding that such trifling disorders were not to be heeded.  "That
we shall presently see," said Catharine; "my poor subjects must have
their own again, or, as God lives, prince's blood for oxen's blood!"
The doors were opened, and armed men took the places of the waiters
behind the chairs of the guests.  Henry changed color; then, as the
best way out of a bad scrape, laughed loudly, and ended by praising the
splendid acting of his hostess, and promising that Alva should order
the cattle restored at once.  Not until a courier returned, saying that
the order had been obeyed, and all damages settled satisfactorily, did
the armed waiters leave.  The Countess then thanked her guests for the
honor they had done her castle, and they retired with protestations of
their distinguished consideration.

It was the heroic devotion of an Indian girl that saved the life of
Captain John Smith, when the powerful King Powhatan had decreed his
death.  Ill could the struggling colony spare him at that time.

When the consul shouted that the bridge was tottering, Lartius and
Herminius sought safety in flight.  But Horatius strode still nearer
the foe, the single champion of his country and liberty, and dared the
ninety thousand to come on.  Dead stillness fell upon the Tuscans, so
astonished were they at the audacity of the Roman.  He first broke the
awful silence, so deep that his clear, strong voice could be heard by
thousands in both armies, between which rolled the Tiber, as he
denounced the baseness and perfidy of the invaders.  Not until his
words were drowned by the loud crash of fiercely disrupturing timbers,
and the sullen splash of the dark river, did his enemies hurl their
showers of arrows and javelins.  Then, dexterously warding off the
missiles with his shield, he plunged into the Tiber.  Although stabbed
in the hip by a Tuscan spear which lamed him for life, he swam in
safety to Rome.

"It is a bad omen," said Eric the Red, when his horse slipped and fell
on the way to his ship, moored on the coast of Greenland, in readiness
for a voyage of discovery.  "Ill-fortune would be mine should I dare
venture now upon the sea."  So he returned to his house, but his young
son Leif decided to go, and, with a crew of thirty-five men, sailed
southward in search of the unknown shore upon which Captain Biarni had
been driven by a storm, while sailing in another Viking ship two or
three years before.  The first land that they saw was probably
Labrador, a barren, rugged plain.  Leif called this country Heluland,
or the land of flat stones.  Sailing onward many days, he came to a
low, level coast thickly covered with woods, on account of which he
called the country Markland, probably the modern Nova Scotia.  Sailing
onward, they came to an island which they named Vinland on account of
the abundance of delicious wild grapes in the woods.  This was in the
year 1000.  Here where the city of Newport, R. I., stands, they spent
many months, and then returned to Greenland with their vessel loaded
with grapes and strange kinds of wood.  The voyage was successful, and
no doubt Eric was sorry he had been frightened by the bad omen.

May 10, 1796, Napoleon carried the bridge at Lodi, in the face of the
Austrian batteries.  Fourteen cannon--some accounts say thirty--were
trained upon the French end of the structure.  Behind them were six
thousand troops.  Napoleon massed four thousand grenadiers at the head
of the bridge, with a battalion of three hundred carbineers in front.
At the tap of the drum the foremost assailants wheeled from the cover
of the street wall under a terrible hail of grape and canister, and
attempted to pass the gateway to the bridge.  The front ranks went down
like stalks of grain before a reaper; the column staggered and reeled
backward, and the valiant grenadiers were appalled by the task before
them.  Without a word or a look of reproach, Napoleon placed himself at
their head, and his aids and generals rushed to his side.  Forward
again, this time over heaps of dead that choked the passage, and a
quick run, counted by seconds only, carried the column across two
hundred yards of clear space, scarcely a shot from the Austrians taking
effect beyond the point where the platoons wheeled for the first leap.
So sudden and so miraculous was it all that the Austrian artillerists
abandoned their guns instantly, and their supports fled in a panic
instead of rushing to the front and meeting the French onslaught.  This
Napoleon had counted on in making the bold attack.  The contrast
between Napoleon's slight figure and the massive grenadiers suggested
the nickname "Little Corporal."

The great secret of the success of Joan of Arc was the boldness of her
attacks.

When Stephen of Colonna fell into the hands of base assailants, and
they asked him in derision, "Where is now your fortress?"  "Here," was
his bold reply, placing his hand upon his heart.

It was after the Mexican War when General McClellan was employed as a
topographical engineer in surveying the Pacific coast.  From his
headquarters at Vancouver he had gone south to the Columbia River with
two companions, a soldier and a servant.  One evening he received word
that the chiefs of the Columbia River tribes desired to confer with
him.  From the messenger's manner he suspected that the Indians meant
mischief.  He warned his companions that they must be ready to leave
camp at a moment's notice.  Mounting his horse, he rode boldly into the
Indian village.  About thirty chiefs were holding council.  McClellan
was led into the circle, and placed at the right hand of Saltese.  He
was familiar with the Chinook jargon, and could understand every word
spoken in the council.  Saltese made known the grievance of the tribes.
Two Indians had been captured by a party of white pioneers and hanged
for theft.  Retaliation for this outrage seemed indispensable.  The
chiefs pondered long, but had little to say.  McClellan had been on
friendly terms with them, and was not responsible for the forest
executions.  Still, he was a white man, and the chiefs had vowed
vengeance against the race.  The council was prolonged for hours before
sentence was passed, and then Saltese, in the name of the head men of
the tribes, decreed that McClellan should immediately be put to death
in retaliation for the hanging of the two Indian thieves.

McClellan had said nothing.  He had known that argument and pleas for
justice or mercy would be of no avail.  He had sat motionless,
apparently indifferent to his fate.  By his listlessness he had thrown
his captors off their guard.  When the sentence was passed he acted
like a flash.  Flinging his left arm around the neck of Saltese, he
whipped out his revolver and held it close to the chief's temple.
"Revoke that sentence, or I shall kill you this instant!" he cried,
with his fingers clicking the trigger.  "I revoke it!" exclaimed
Saltese, fairly livid from fear.  "I must have your word that I can
leave this council in safety."  "You have the word of Saltese," was the
quick response.  McClellan knew how sacred was the pledge which he had
received.  The revolver was lowered.  Saltese was released from the
embrace of the strong arm.  McClellan strode out of the tent with his
revolver in his hand.  Not a hand was raised against him.  He mounted
his horse and rode to his camp, where his two followers were ready to
spring into the saddle and to escape from the villages.  He owed his
life to his quickness of perception, and to his accurate knowledge of
Indian character.

In 1866, Rufus Choate spoke to an audience of nearly five thousand in
Lowell in favor of the candidacy of James Buchanan for the presidency.
The floor of the great hall began to sink, settling more and more as he
proceeded with his address, until a sound of cracking timber below
would have precipitated a stampede with fatal results but for the
coolness of B. F. Butler, who presided.  Telling the people to remain
quiet, he said that he would see if there were any cause for alarm.  He
found the supports of the floor in so bad a condition that the
slightest applause would be likely to bury the audience in the ruins of
the building.  Returning rather leisurely to the platform, he whispered
to Choate as he passed, "We shall all be in ---- in five minutes," then
he told the crowd that there was no immediate danger if they would
slowly disperse, although he thought it prudent to adjourn to a place
where there would be no risk whatever.  The post of danger, he added,
was on the platform, which was most weakly supported, therefore he and
those with him would be the last to leave.  No doubt many lives were
saved by his coolness.

Many distinguished foreign and American statesmen were present at a
fashionable dinner party where wine was freely poured, but Schuyler
Colfax, then vice-president of the United States, declined to drink
from a proffered cup.  "Colfax dares not drink," sneered a Senator who
had already taken too much.  "You are right," said the Vice-President,
"I dare not."

When Grant was in Houston several years ago, he was given a rousing
reception.  Naturally hospitable, and naturally inclined to like a man
of Grant's make-up, the Houstonites determined to go beyond any other
Southern city in the way of a banquet and other manifestations of their
good-will and hospitality.  They made great preparations for the
dinner, the committee taking great pains to have the finest wines that
could be procured for the table that night.  When the time came to
serve the wine, the head-waiter went first to Grant.  Without a word
the general quietly turned down all the glasses at his plate.  This
movement was a great surprise to the Texans, but they were equal to the
occasion.  Without a single word being spoken, every man along the line
of the long tables turned his glasses down, and there was not a drop of
wine taken that night.

A deep sewer at Noyon, France, had been opened for repairs, and
carelessly left at night without covering or lights to warn people of
danger.  Late at night four men stumbled in, and lay some time before
their situation was known in the town.  No one dared go to the aid of
the men, then unconscious from breathing noxious gases, except
Catherine Vassen, a servant girl of eighteen.  She insisted on being
lowered at once.  Fastening a rope around two of the men, she aided in
raising them and restoring them to consciousness.  Descending again,
she had just tied a rope around a third man, when she felt her breath
failing.  Tying another rope to her long, curly hair, she swooned, but
was drawn up with the man, to be quickly revived by fresh air and
stimulants.  The fourth man was dead when his body was pulled up, on
account of the delay from the fainting of Catherine.

Two French officers at Waterloo were advancing to charge a greatly
superior force.  One, observing that the other showed signs of fear,
said, "Sir, I believe you are frightened."  "Yes, I am," was the reply,
"and if you were half as much frightened, you would run away."

"That's a brave man," said Wellington, when he saw a soldier turn pale
as he marched against a battery; "he knows his danger, and faces it."

"There are many cardinals and bishops at Worms," said a friend to
Luther, "and they will burn your body to ashes as they did that of John
Huss."  Luther replied: "Although they should make a fire that should
reach from Worms to Wittenberg, and that should flame up to heaven, in
the Lord's name I would pass through it and appear before them."  He
said to another: "I would enter Worms though there were as many devils
there as there are tiles upon the roofs of the houses."  Another said:
"Duke George will surely arrest you."  He replied: "It is my duty to
go, and I will go, though it rain Duke Georges for nine days together."

"Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me," exclaimed Luther at
the Diet of Worms, facing his foes.

A Western paper recently invited the surviving Union and Confederate
officers to give an account of the bravest act observed by each during
the Civil War.  Colonel Thomas W. Higginson said that at a dinner at
Beaufort, S. C., where wine flowed freely and ribald jests were
bandied, Dr. Miner, a slight, boyish fellow who did not drink, was told
that he could not go until he had drunk a toast, told a story, or sung
a song.  He replied: "I cannot sing, but I will give a toast, although
I must drink it in water.  It is 'Our Mothers.'"  The men were so
affected and ashamed that some took him by the hand and thanked him for
displaying courage greater than that required to walk up to the mouth
of a cannon.

It took great courage for the commercial Quaker, John Bright, to
espouse a cause which called down upon his head the derision and scorn
and hatred of the Parliament.  For years he rested under a cloud of
obloquy, but Bright was made of stern stuff.  It was only his strength
of character and masterly eloquence, which saved him from political
annihilation.  To a man who boasted that his ancestors came over with
the Conquerors, he replied, "I never heard that they did anything
else."  A Tory lordling said, when Bright was ill, that Providence had
inflicted upon Bright, for the measure of his talents, disease of the
brain.  When Bright went back into the Commons he replied: "This may be
so, but it will be some consolation to the friends and family of the
noble lord to know that that disease is one which even Providence
cannot inflict upon him."

"When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the World,
and takes him boldly by the beard," says Holmes, "he is often surprised
to find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare
away timid adventurers."

It takes courage for a young man to stand firmly erect while others are
bowing and fawning for praise and power.  It takes courage to wear
threadbare clothes while your comrades dress in broadcloth.  It takes
courage to remain in honest poverty when others grow rich by fraud.  It
takes courage to say "No" squarely when those around you say "Yes."  It
takes courage to do your duty in silence and obscurity while others
prosper and grow famous although neglecting sacred obligations.  It
takes courage to unmask your true self, to show your blemishes to a
condemning world, and to pass for what you really are.

It takes courage and pluck to be outvoted, beaten, laughed at, scoffed,
ridiculed, derided, misunderstood, misjudged, to stand alone with all
the world against you, but

  "They are slaves who dare not be
  In the right with two or three."


"There is never wanting a dog to bark at you."

"An honest man is not the worse because a dog barks at him."

  "Let any man show the world that he feels
  Afraid of its bark, and 'twill fly at his heels.
  Let him fearlessly face it, 't will leave him alone,
  And 't will fawn at his feet if he fling it a bone."


We live ridiculously for fear of being thought ridiculous.

  "'Tis he is the coward who proves false to his vows,
  To his manhood, his honor, for a laugh or a sneer:
  'Tis he is the hero who stands firm, though alone,
  For the truth and the right without flinching or fear."


The youth who starts out by being afraid to speak what he thinks will
usually end by being afraid to think what he wishes.

How we shrink from an act of our own.  We live as others live.  Custom
or fashion dictates, or your doctor or minister, and they in turn dare
not depart from their schools.  Dress, living, servants, carriages,
everything must conform, or be ostracized.  Who dares conduct his
household or business affairs in his own way, and snap his fingers at
Dame Grundy?

Many a man has marched up to the cannon's mouth in battle who dared not
face public opinion or oppose Mrs. Grundy.

It takes courage for a public man not to bend the knee to popular
prejudice.  It takes courage to refuse to follow custom when it is
injurious to his health and morals.  To espouse an unpopular cause in
Congress requires more courage than to lead a charge in battle.  How
much easier for a politician to prevaricate and dodge an issue than to
stand squarely on his feet like a man.

As a rule, eccentricity is a badge of power, but how many women would
not rather strangle their individuality than be tabooed by Mrs. Grundy?
Yet fear is really the only thing to fear.

"Whoever you may be," said Sainte-Beuve, "great genius, distinguished
talent, artist honorable or amiable, the qualities for which you
deserve to be praised will all be turned against you.  Were you a
Virgil, the pious and sensible singer _par excellence_, there are
people who will call you an effeminate poet.  Were you a Horace, there
are people who will reproach you with the very purity and delicacy of
your taste.  If you were a Shakespeare, some one will call you a
drunken savage.  If you were a Goethe, more than one Pharisee will
proclaim you the most selfish of egotists."

As the strongest man has a weakness somewhere, so the greatest hero is
a coward somewhere.  Peter was courageous enough to draw his sword to
defend his master, but he could not stand the ridicule and the finger
of scorn of the maidens in the high priest's hall, and he actually
denied even the acquaintance of the master he had declared he would die
for.

"I will take the responsibility," said Andrew Jackson, on a memorable
occasion, and his words have become proverbial.  Not even Congress
dared to oppose the edicts of John Quincy Adams.

If a man would accomplish anything in this world, he must not be afraid
of assuming responsibilities.  Of course it takes courage to run the
risk of failure, to be subjected to criticism for an unpopular cause,
to expose one's self to the shafts of everybody's ridicule, but the man
who is not true to himself, who cannot carry out the sealed orders
placed in his hands at his birth, regardless of the world's yes or no,
of its approval or disapproval, the man who has not the courage to
trace the pattern of his own destiny, which no other soul knows but his
own, can never rise to the true dignity of manhood.  All the world
loves courage; youth craves it; they want to hear about it, they want
to read about it.  The fascination of the "blood and thunder" novels
and of the cheap story papers for youth are based upon this idea of
courage.  If the boys cannot get the real article, they will take a
counterfeit.

Don't be like Uriah Heep, begging everybody's pardon for taking the
liberty of being in the world.  There is nothing attractive in
timidity, nothing lovable in fear.  Both are deformities and are
repulsive.  Manly courage is dignified and graceful.  The worst manners
in the world are those of persons conscious "of being beneath their
position, and trying to conceal it or make up for it by style."

Bruno, condemned to be burned alive in Rome, said to his judge: "You
are more afraid to pronounce my sentence than I am to receive it."
Anne Askew, racked until her bones were dislocated, never flinched, but
looked her tormentor calmly in the face and refused to abjure her faith.

"We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid
of each other."  "Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage," said
Emerson.  Physicians used to teach that courage depends on the
circulation of the blood in the arteries, and that during passion,
anger, trials of strength, wrestling or fighting, a large amount of
blood is collected in the arteries, and does not pass to the veins.  A
strong pulse is a fortune in itself.

"Rage," said Shaftesbury, "can make a coward forget himself and fight."

"I should have thought fear would have kept you from going so far,"
said a relative who found the little boy Nelson wandering a long
distance from home.  "Fear?" said the future admiral, "I don't know
him."

"Doubt indulged becomes doubt realized."  To determine to do anything
is half the battle.  "To think a thing is impossible is to make it so."
_Courage is victory, timidity is defeat_.

That simple shepherd-lad, David, fresh from his flocks, marching
unattended and unarmed, save with his shepherd's staff and sling, to
confront the colossal Goliath with his massive armor, is the sublimest
audacity the world has ever seen.

"Dent, I wish you would get down, and see what is the matter with that
leg there," said Grant, when he and Colonel Dent were riding through
the thickest of a fire that had become so concentrated and murderous
that his troops had all been driven back.  "I guess looking after your
horse's legs can wait," said Dent; "it is simply murder for us to sit
here."  "All right," said Grant, "if you don't want to see to it, I
will."  He dismounted, untwisted a piece of telegraph wire which had
begun to cut the horse's leg, examined it deliberately, and climbed
into his saddle.  "Dent," said he, "when you've got a horse that you
think a great deal of, you should never take any chances with him.  If
that wire had been left there for a little time longer he would have
gone dead lame, and would perhaps have been ruined for life."

Wellington said that at Waterloo the hottest of the battle raged round
a farmhouse, with an orchard surrounded by a thick hedge, which was so
important a point in the British position that orders were given to
hold it at any hazard or sacrifice.  At last the powder and ball ran
short and the hedges took fire, surrounding the orchard with a wall of
flame.  A messenger had been sent for ammunition, and soon two loaded
wagons came galloping toward the farmhouse.  "The driver of the first
wagon, with the reckless daring of an English boy, spurred his
struggling and terrified horses through the burning heap; but the
flames rose fiercely round, and caught the powder, which exploded in an
instant, sending wagon, horses, and rider in fragments into the air.
For an instant the driver of the second wagon paused, appalled by his
comrade's fate; the next, observing that the flames, beaten back for
the moment by the explosion, afforded him one desperate chance, sent
his horses at the smouldering breach and, amid the deafening cheers of
the garrison, landed his terrible cargo safely within.  Behind him the
flames closed up, and raged more fiercely than ever."

At the battle of Friedland a cannon-ball came over the heads of the
French soldiers, and a young soldier instinctively dodged.  Napoleon
looked at him and smilingly said: "My friend, if that ball were
destined for you, though you were to burrow a hundred feet under ground
it would be sure to find you there."

When the mine in front of Petersburg was finished, the fuse was
lighted, and the Union troops were drawn up ready to charge the enemy's
works as soon as the explosion should make a breach.  But seconds,
minutes, and tens of minutes passed, without a sound from the mine, and
the suspense became painful.  Lieutenant Doughty and Sergeant Kees
volunteered to examine the fuse.  Through the long subterranean
galleries they hurried in silence, not knowing but they were advancing
to a horrible death.  They found the defect, fired the train anew, and
soon a terrible upheaval of earth gave the signal to march to victory.

At the battle of Copenhagen, as Nelson walked the deck slippery with
blood and covered with the dead, he said: "This is warm work, and this
day may be the last to any of us in a moment.  But, mark me, I would
not be elsewhere for thousands."  At the battle of Trafalgar, when
Nelson was shot and was being carried below, he covered his face, that
those fighting might not know their chief had fallen.

In a skirmish at Salamanca, while the enemy's guns were pouring shot
into his regiment, Sir William Napier's men became disobedient.  He at
once ordered a halt, and flogged four of the ringleaders under fire.
The men yielded at once, and then marched three miles under a heavy
cannonade as coolly as if it were a review.

Execute your resolutions immediately.  Thoughts are but dreams till
their effects be tried.  Does competition trouble you? work away; what
is your competitor but a man?  _Conquer your place in the world_, for
all things serve a brave soul.  Combat difficulty manfully; sustain
misfortune bravely; endure poverty nobly; encounter disappointment
courageously.  The influence of the brave man is a magnetism which
creates an epidemic of noble zeal in all about him.  Every day sends to
the grave obscure men, who have only remained in obscurity because
their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort; and who,
if they could have been induced to begin, would, in all probability,
have gone great lengths in the career of usefulness and fame.  "No
great deed is done," says George Eliot, "by falterers who ask for
certainty."  The brave, cheerful man will survive his blighted hopes
and disappointments, take them for just what they are, lessons and
perhaps blessings in disguise, and will march boldly and cheerfully
forward in the battle of life.  Or, if necessary, he will bear his ills
with a patience and calm endurance deeper than ever plummet sounded.
He is the true hero.

  Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
  Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just;
  Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
  Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.
        LOWELL.

            Our doubts are traitors,
  And make us lose the good we oft might win,
  By fearing to attempt.
        SHAKESPEARE.


After the great inward struggle was over, and he had determined to
remain loyal to his principles, Thomas More walked cheerfully to the
block.  His wife called him a fool for staying in a dark, damp, filthy
prison when he might have his liberty by merely renouncing his
doctrines, as some of the bishops had done.  But he preferred death to
dishonor.  His daughter allowed the power of love to drive away fear.
She remained true to her father when all others, even her mother, had
forsaken him.  After his head had been cut off and exhibited on a pole
on London Bridge, the poor girl begged it of the authorities, and
requested that it be buried in the coffin with her.  Her request was
granted, for her death occurred soon.

When Sir Walter Raleigh came to the scaffold he was very faint, and
began his speech to the crowd by saying that during the last two days
he had been visited by two ague fits.  "If, therefore, you perceive any
weakness in me, I beseech you ascribe it to my sickness rather than to
myself."  He took the axe and kissed the blade, and said to the
sheriff: "'T is a sharp medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases."

Don't waste time dreaming of obstacles you may never encounter, or in
crossing bridges you have not reached.  Don't fool with a nettle!
Grasp with firmness if you would rob it of its sting.  To half will and
to hang forever in the balance is to lose your grip on life.

Abraham Lincoln's boyhood was one long struggle with poverty, with
little education, and no influential friends.  When at last he had
begun the practice of law, it required no little daring to cast his
fortune with the weaker side in politics, and thus imperil what small
reputation he had gained.  Only the most sublime moral courage could
have sustained him as President to hold his ground against hostile
criticism and a long train of disaster; to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation; to support Grant and Stanton against the clamor of the
politicians and the press; and through it all to do the right as God
gave him to see the right.

Lincoln never shrank from espousing an unpopular cause when he believed
it to be right.  At the time when it almost cost a young lawyer his
bread and butter to defend the fugitive slave, and when other lawyers
had refused, Lincoln would always plead the cause of the unfortunate
whenever an opportunity presented.  "Go to Lincoln," people would say,
when these hounded fugitives were seeking protection; "he's not afraid
of any cause, if it's right."

As Salmon P. Chase left the court room after making an impassioned plea
for the runaway slave girl Matilda, a man looked at him in surprise and
said: "There goes a fine young fellow who has just ruined himself."
But in thus ruining himself Chase had taken the first important step in
a career in which he became Governor of Ohio, United States Senator
from Ohio, Secretary of the United States Treasury, and Chief Justice
of the United States Supreme Court.

At the trial of William Penn for having spoken at a Quaker meeting, the
recorder, not satisfied with the first verdict, said to the jury: "We
will have a verdict by the help of God, or you shall starve for it."
"You are Englishmen," said Penn; "mind your privileges, give not away
your right."  At last the jury, after two days and two nights without
food, returned a verdict of "Not guilty."  The recorder fined them
forty marks apiece for their independence.

What cared Christ for the jeers of the crowd?  The palsied hand moved,
the blind saw, the leper was made whole, the dead spake, despite the
ridicule and scoffs of the spectators.

What cared Wendell Phillips for rotten eggs, derisive scorn, and
hisses?  In him "at last the scornful world had met its match."  Were
Beecher and Gough to be silenced by the rude English mobs that came to
extinguish them?  No! they held their ground and compelled unwilling
thousands to hear and to heed.  Did Anna Dickinson leave the platform
when the pistol bullets of the Molly Maguires flew about her head?  She
silenced those pistols by her courage and her arguments.

"What the world wants is a Knox, who dares to preach on with a musket
leveled at his head, a Garrison, who is not afraid of a jail, or a mob,
or a scaffold erected in front of his door.

  "Storms may howl around thee,
    Foes may hunt and hound thee:
  Shall they overpower thee?
    Never, never, never."


When General Butler was sent with nine thousand men to quell the New
York riots, he arrived in advance of his troops, and found the streets
thronged with an angry mob, which had already hanged more than one man
to lamp-posts.  Without waiting for his men, Butler went to the place
where the crowd was most dense, overturned an ash barrel, stood upon
it, and began: "Delegates from Five Points, fiends from hell, you have
murdered your superiors," and the blood-stained crowd quailed before
the courageous words of a single man in a city which Mayor Fernando
Wood could not restrain with the aid of police and militia.

"Our enemies are before us," exclaimed the Spartans at Thermopylae.
"And we are before them," was the cool reply of Leonidas.  "Deliver
your arms," came the message from Xerxes.  "Come and take them," was
the answer Leonidas sent back.  A Persian soldier said: "You will not
be able to see the sun for flying javelins and arrows."  "Then we will
fight in the shade," replied a Lacedemonian.  What wonder that a
handful of such men checked the march of the greatest host that ever
trod the earth.

"It is impossible," said a staff officer, when Napoleon gave directions
for a daring plan.  "Impossible!" thundered the great commander,
"_impossible_ is the adjective of fools!"  Napoleon went to the edge of
his possibility.

Grant never knew when he was beaten.  When told that he was surrounded
by the enemy at Belmont, he quietly replied: "Well, then we must cut
our way out."

The courageous man is an example to the intrepid.  His influence is
magnetic.  He creates an epidemic of nobleness.  Men follow him, even
to the death.

The spirit of courage will transform the whole temper of your life.
"The wise and active conquer difficulties by daring to attempt them.
Sloth and folly shiver and sicken at the sight of trial and hazard, and
make the impossibility they fear."

"The hero," says Emerson, "is the man who is immovably centred."

Emin Pasha, the explorer of Africa, was left behind by his exploring
party under circumstances that were thought certainly fatal, and his
death was reported with great assurance.  Early the next winter, as his
troop was on its toilsome but exciting way through Central Africa, it
came upon a most wretched sight.  A party of natives had been kidnapped
by the slave-hunters, and dragged in chains thus far toward the land of
bondage.  But small-pox had set in, and the miserable company had been
abandoned to their fate.  Emin sent his men ahead, and stayed behind in
this camp of death to act as physician and nurse.  How many lives he
saved is not known, though it is known that he nearly lost his own.
The age of chivalry is not gone by.  This is as knightly a deed as poet
ever chronicled.

A mouse that dwelt near the abode of a great magician was kept in such
constant distress by its fear of a cat, that the magician, taking pity
on it, turned it into a cat itself.  Immediately it began to suffer
from its fear of a dog, so the magician turned it into a dog.  Then it
began to suffer from fear of a tiger.  The magician therefore turned it
into a tiger.  Then it began to suffer from fear of hunters, and the
magician said in disgust: "Be a mouse again.  As you have only the
heart of a mouse, it is impossible to help you by giving you the body
of a nobler animal."

Men who have dared have moved the world, often before reaching the
prime of life.  It is astonishing what daring to begin and perseverance
have enabled even youths to achieve.  Alexander, who ascended the
throne at twenty, had conquered the known world before dying at
thirty-three.  Julius Caesar captured eight hundred cities, conquered
three hundred nations, and defeated three million men, became a great
orator and one of the greatest statesmen known, and still was a young
man.  Washington was appointed adjutant-general at nineteen, was sent
at twenty-one as an ambassador to treat with the French, and won his
first battle as a colonel at twenty-two.  Lafayette was made general of
the whole French army at twenty.  Charlemagne was master of France and
Germany at thirty.  Condé was only twenty-two when he conquered at
Rocroi.  Galileo was but eighteen when he saw the principle of the
pendulum in the swinging lamp in the cathedral at Pisa.  Peel was in
Parliament at twenty-one.  Gladstone was in Parliament before he was
twenty-two, and at twenty-four he was Lord of the Treasury.  Elizabeth
Barrett Browning was proficient in Greek and Latin at twelve; De
Quincey at eleven.  Robert Browning wrote at eleven poetry of no mean
order.  Cowley, who sleeps in Westminster Abbey, published a volume of
poems at fifteen.  N. P. Willis won lasting fame as a poet before
leaving college.  Macaulay was a celebrated author before he was
twenty-three.  Luther was but twenty-nine when he nailed his famous
thesis to the door of the bishop and defied the pope.  Nelson was a
lieutenant in the British Navy before he was twenty.  He was but
forty-seven when he received his death wound at Trafalgar.  Charles the
Twelfth was only nineteen when he gained the battle of Narva; at
thirty-six, Cortez was the conqueror of Mexico; at thirty-two, Clive
had established the British power in India.  Hannibal, the greatest of
military commanders, was only thirty when, at Cannae, he dealt an
almost annihilating blow at the republic of Rome; and Napoleon was only
twenty-seven when, on the plains of Italy, he outgeneraled and
defeated, one after another, the veteran marshals of Austria.

Equal courage and resolution are often shown by men who have passed the
allotted limit of life.  Victor Hugo and Wellington were both in their
prime after they had reached the age of threescore years and ten.
George Bancroft wrote some of his best historical work when he was
eighty-five.  Gladstone ruled England with a strong hand at
eighty-four, and was a marvel of literary and scholarly ability.

"Not every vessel that sails from Tarshish will bring back the gold of
Ophir.  But shall it therefore rot in the harbor?  No!  Give its sails
to the wind!"

Shakespeare says: "He is not worthy of the honeycomb that shuns the
hive because the bees have stings."

  "The brave man is not he who feels no fear,
    For that were stupid and irrational;
  But he whose noble soul its fear subdues
    And bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from."


The inscription on the gates of Busyrane: "Be bold."  On the second
gate: "Be bold, be bold, and ever more be bold;" the third gate: "Be
not too bold."

Many a bright youth has accomplished nothing of worth simply because he
did not dare to commence.

Begin!  Begin!!  Begin!!!


Whatever people may think of you, do that which you believe to be
right.  Be alike indifferent to censure or praise.--PYTHAGORAS.

Fear makes man a slave to others.  This is the tyrant's chain.  Anxiety
is a form of cowardice embittering life.--CHANNING.

Courage is generosity of the highest order, for the brave are prodigal
of the most precious things.  Our blood is nearer and dearer to us than
our money, and our life than our estate.  Women are more taken with
courage than with generosity.--COLTON.

  Who chooses me must give and hazard all he hath.
      _Merchant of Venice_, Inscription on Leaden Casket.

  I dare to do all that may become a man:
  Who dares do more is none.
        SHAKESPEAKE.

For man's great actions are performed in minor struggles.  There are
obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the
shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude.  There are
noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees, no renown rewards, and
no flourish of trumpets salutes.  Life, misfortune, isolation,
abandonment, and poverty are battlefields which have their
heroes.--VICTOR HUGO.

  Who waits until the wind shall silent keep,
    Who never finds the ready hour to sow,
  Who watcheth clouds, will have no time to reap.
        HELEN HUNT JACKSON.

Quit yourselves like men.--1 SAMUEL iv. 9.




CHAPTER III.

THE WILL AND THE WAY.

"The 'way' will be found by a resolute will."

"I will find a way or make one."

Nothing is impossible to the man who can will.--MIRABEAU.

A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a
politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.--E. P. WHIPPLE.

  The iron will of one stout heart shall make a thousand quail;
  A feeble dwarf, dauntlessly resolved, will turn the tide of battle,
  And rally to a nobler strife the giants that had fled.
        TUPPER.

"Man alone can perform the impossible.  They can who think they can.
Character is a perfectly educated will."

The education of the will is the object of our existence.  For the
resolute and determined there is time and opportunity.--EMERSON.

Invincible determination, and a right nature, are the levers that move
the world.--PRESIDENT PORTER.

In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves for a bright manhood there
is no such word as fail.--BULWER.

Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance and
make a seeming difficulty give way.--JEREMY COLLIER.

When a firm and decisive spirit is recognized, it is curious to see how
the space clears around a man and leaves him room and freedom.--JOHN
FOSTER.

  The star of the unconquered will,
  He rises in my breast,
  Serene, and resolute and still,
  And calm and self-possessed.
        LONGFELLOW.


"As well can the Prince of Orange pluck the stars from the sky, as
bring the ocean to the wall of Leyden for your relief," was the
derisive shout of the Spanish soldiers when told that the Dutch fleet
would raise that terrible four months' siege of 1574.  But from the
parched lips of William, tossing on his bed of fever at Rotterdam, had
issued the command: "_Break down the dikes: give Holland back to
ocean:_" and the people had replied: "Better a drowned land than a lost
land."  They began to demolish dike after dike of the strong lines,
ranged one within another for fifteen miles to their city of the
interior.  It was an enormous task; the garrison was starving; and the
besiegers laughed in scorn at the slow progress of the puny insects who
sought to rule the waves of the sea.  But ever, as of old, heaven aids
those who help themselves.  On the first and second of October a
violent equinoctial gale rolled the ocean inland, and swept the fleet
on the rising waters almost to the camp of the Spaniards.  The next
morning the garrison sallied out to attack their enemies, but the
besiegers had fled in terror under cover of the darkness.  The next day
the wind changed, and a counter tempest brushed the water, with the
fleet upon it, from the surface of Holland.  The outer dikes were
replaced at once, leaving the North Sea within its old bounds.  When
the flowers bloomed the following spring, a joyous procession marched
through the streets to found the University of Leyden, in commemoration
of the wonderful deliverance of the city.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

[Illustration: WALTER SCOTT]

"The Wizard of the North."

  "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
    So near is God to man,
  When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
    The youth replies, 'I can.'"

      *      *      *      *      *      *

At a dinner party given in 1837, at the residence of Chancellor Kent,
in New York city, some of the most distinguished men in the country
were invited, and among them was a young and rather melancholy and
reticent Frenchman.  Professor Morse was one of the guests, and during
the evening he drew the attention of Mr. Gallatin, then a prominent
statesman, to the stranger, observing that his forehead indicated great
intellect.  "Yes," replied Mr. Gallatin, touching his own forehead with
his finger, "there is a great deal in that head of his: but he has a
strange fancy.  Can you believe it?  He has the idea that he will one
day be the Emperor of France.  Can you conceive anything more absurd?"

It did seem absurd, for this reserved Frenchman was then a poor
adventurer, an exile from his country, without fortune or powerful
connections, and yet, fourteen years later, his idea became a
fact,--his dream of becoming Napoleon III. was realized.  True, before
he accomplished his purpose there were long dreary years of
imprisonment, exile, disaster, and patient labor and hope, but he
gained his ambition at last.  He was not scrupulous as to the means
employed to accomplish his ends, yet he is a remarkable example of what
pluck and energy can do.

When it was proposed to unite England and America by steam, Dr. Lardner
delivered a lecture before the Royal Society "proving" that steamers
could never cross the Atlantic, because they could not carry coal
enough to produce steam during the whole voyage.  The passage of the
steamship Sirius, which crossed in nineteen days, was fatal to
Lardner's theory.  When it was proposed to build a vessel of iron, many
persons said: "Iron sinks--only wood can float:" but experiments proved
that the miracle of the prophet in making iron "swim" could be
repeated, and now not only ships of war, but merchant vessels, are
built of iron or steel.  A will found a way to make iron float.

Mr. Ingram, publisher of the "London Illustrated News," who lost his
life on Lake Michigan, walked ten miles to deliver a single paper
rather than disappoint a customer, when he began life as a newsdealer
at Nottingham, England.  Does any one wonder that such a youth
succeeded?  Once he rose at two o'clock in the morning and walked to
London to get some papers because there was no post to bring them.  He
determined that his customers should not be disappointed.  This is the
kind of will that finds a way.

There is scarcely anything in all biography grander than the saying of
young Henry Fawcett, Gladstone's last Postmaster-General, to his
grief-stricken father, who had put out both his eyes by bird-shot
during a game hunt: "Never mind, father, blindness shall not interfere
with my success in life."  One of the most pathetic sights in London
streets, long afterward, was Henry Fawcett, M. P., led everywhere by a
faithful daughter, who acted as amanuensis as well as guide to her
plucky father.  Think of a young man, scarcely on the threshold of
active life, suddenly losing the sight of both eyes and yet, by mere
pluck and almost incomprehensible tenacity of purpose, lifting himself
into eminence, in any direction, to say nothing of becoming one of the
foremost men in a country noted for its great men.  Most youth would
have succumbed to such a misfortune, and would never have been heard
from again.  But fortunately for the world, there are yet left many
Fawcetts, many Prescotts, Parkmans, Cavanaghs.

The courageous daughter who was eyes to her father was herself a
marvelous example of pluck and determination.  For the first time in
the history of Oxford College, which reaches back centuries, she
succeeded in winning the post which had only been gained before by
great men, such as Gladstone,--the post of senior wrangler.  This
achievement had had no parallel in history up to that date, and
attracted the attention of the whole civilized world.  Not only had no
woman ever held this position before, but with few exceptions it had
only been held by men who in after life became highly distinguished.
Who can deny that where there is a will, as a rule, there's a way?

When Grant was a boy he could not find "can't" in the dictionary.  It
is the men who have no "can't" in their dictionaries that make things
move.

"Circumstances," says Milton, "have rarely favored famous men.  They
have fought their way to triumph through all sorts of opposing
obstacles."

The true way to conquer circumstances is to be a greater circumstance
yourself.

Yet, while desiring to impress in the most forcible manner possible the
fact that will-power is necessary to success, and that, other things
being equal, the greater the will-power, the grander and more complete
the success, we cannot indorse the preposterous theory that there is
nothing in circumstances or environments, or that any man, simply
because he has an indomitable will, may become a Bonaparte, a Pitt, a
Webster, a Beecher, a Lincoln.  We must temper determination with
discretion, and support it with knowledge and common sense, or it will
only lead us to run our heads against posts.  We must not expect to
overcome a stubborn fact by a stubborn will.  We merely have the right
to assume that we can do anything within the limit of our utmost
faculty, strength, and endurance.  Obstacles permanently insurmountable
bar our progress in some directions, but in any direction we may
reasonably hope and attempt to go, we shall find that the obstacles, as
a rule, are either not insurmountable or else not permanent.  The
strong-willed, intelligent, persistent man will find or make a way
where, in the nature of things, a way can be found or made.

Every schoolboy knows that circumstances do give clients to lawyers and
patients to physicians; place ordinary clergymen in extraordinary
pulpits; place sons of the rich at the head of immense corporations and
large houses, when they have very ordinary ability and scarcely any
experience, while poor young men with extraordinary abilities, good
education, good character, and large experience, often have to fight
their way for years to obtain even very ordinary situations.  Every one
knows that there are thousands of young men, both in the city and in
the country, of superior ability, who seem to be compelled by
circumstances to remain in very ordinary positions for small pay, when
others about them are raised by money or family influence into
desirable places.  In other words, we all know that the best men do not
always get the best places: circumstances do have a great deal to do
with our position, our salaries, and our station in life.

Many young men who are nature's noblemen, who are natural leaders, are
working under superintendents, foremen, and managers infinitely their
inferiors, but whom circumstances have placed above them and will keep
there, unless some emergency makes merit indispensable.  No, the race
is not always to the swift.

Every one knows that there is not always a way where there is a will,
that labor does not always conquer all things; that there are things
impossible even to him that wills, however strongly; that one cannot
always make anything of himself he chooses; that there are limitations
in our very natures which no amount of will-power or industry can
overcome; that no amount of sun-staring can ever make an eagle out of a
crow.

The simple truth is that a will strong enough to keep a man continually
striving for things not wholly beyond his powers will carry him in time
very far toward his chosen goal.

The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most
possible out of the stuff that has been given to him.  This is success,
and there is no other.

While it is true that our circumstances or environments do affect us,
in most things they do not prevent our growth.  The corn that is now
ripe, whence comes it, and what is it?  Is it not large or small,
stunted wild maize or well-developed ears, according to the conditions
under which it has grown?  Yet its environments cannot make wheat of
it.  Nor can our circumstances alter our nature.  It is part of our
nature, and wholly within our power, greatly to change and to take
advantage of our circumstances, so that, unlike the corn, we can rise
much superior to our natural surroundings simply because we can thus
vary and improve the surroundings.  In other words, man can usually
build the very road on which he is to run his race.

It is not a question of what some one else can do or become, which
every youth should ask himself, but what can I do?  How can I develop
myself into the grandest possible manhood?

So far, then, from the power of circumstances being a hindrance to men
in trying to build for themselves an imperial highway to fortune, these
circumstances constitute the very quarry out of which they are to get
paving-stones for the road.

While it is true that the will-power cannot perform miracles, yet that
it is almost omnipotent, that it can perform wonders, all history goes
to prove.  As Shakespeare says:--

  "Men at some time are masters of their fates:
  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
  But in ourselves, that we are underlings."


"There is nobody," says a Roman Cardinal, "whom Fortune does not visit
once in his life: but when she finds he is not ready to receive her,
she goes in at the door, and out through the window."  Opportunity is
coy.  The careless, the slow, the unobservant, the lazy fail to see it,
or clutch at it when it has gone.  The sharp fellows detect it
instantly, and catch it when on the wing.

Show me a man who is, according to popular prejudice, a victim of bad
luck, and I will show you one who has some unfortunate crooked twist of
temperament that invites disaster.  He is ill-tempered, or conceited,
or trifling; lacks character, enthusiasm, or some other requisite for
success.

Disraeli says that man is not the creature of circumstances, but that
circumstances are the creatures of men.

What has chance ever done in the world?  Has it built any cities?  Has
it invented any telephones, any telegraphs?  Has it built any
steamships, established any universities, any asylums, any hospitals?
Was there any chance in Caesar's crossing the Rubicon?  What had chance
to do with Napoleon's career, with Wellington's, or Grant's, or Von
Moltke's?  Every battle was won before it was begun.  What had luck to
do with Thermopylae, Trafalgar, Gettysburg?  Our successes we ascribe
to ourselves; our failures to destiny.

Man is not a helpless atom in this vast creation, with a fixed
position, and naught to do but obey his own polarity.

Believe in the power of will, which annihilates the sickly, sentimental
doctrine of fatalism,--you must but can't, you ought but it is
impossible.

Give me the man

  "Who breaks his birth's invidious bar,
  And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
  And breasts the blows of circumstance,
  And grapples with his evil star."


It is only the ignorant and superficial who believe in fate.  "The
first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity."  "Fate is
unpenetrated causes."  "They may well fear fate who have any infirmity
of habit or aim: but he who rests on what he is has a destiny beyond
destiny, and can make mouths at fortune."

The indomitable will, the inflexible purpose, will find a way or make
one.  There is always room for a man of force.

"He who has a firm will," says Goethe, "moulds the world to himself."
"People do not lack strength," says Victor Hugo, "they lack will."

"He who resolves upon any great end, by that very resolution has scaled
the great barriers to it, and he who seizes the grand idea of
self-cultivation, and solemnly resolves upon it, will find that idea,
that resolution, burning like fire within him, and ever putting him
upon his own improvement.  He will find it removing difficulties,
searching out, or making means; giving courage for despondency, and
strength for weakness."

Nearly all great men, those who have towered high above their fellows,
have been remarkable above all things else for their energy of will.
Of Julius Caesar it was said by a contemporary that it was his activity
and giant determination, rather than his military skill, that won his
victories.  The youth who starts out in life determined to make the
most of his eyes and let nothing escape him which he can possibly use
for his own advancement; who keeps his ears open for every sound that
can help him on his way, who keeps his hands open that he may clutch
every opportunity, who is ever on the alert for everything which can
help him to get on in the world, who seizes every experience in life
and grinds it up into paint for his great life's picture, who keeps his
heart open that he may catch every noble impulse, and everything which
may inspire him,--that youth will be sure to make his life successful;
there are no "ifs" or "ands" about it.  If he has his health, nothing
can keep him from final success.

No tyranny of circumstances can permanently imprison a determined will.

The world always stands aside for the determined man.  Will makes a
way, even through seeming impossibilities.  "It is the half a neck
nearer that shows the blood and wins the race; the one march more that
wins the campaign: the five minutes more of unyielding courage that
wins the fight."  Again and again had the irrepressible Carter Harrison
been consigned to oblivion by the educated and moral element of
Chicago.  Nothing could keep him down.  He was invincible.  A son of
Chicago, he had partaken of that nineteenth century miracle, that
phoenix-like nature of the city which, though she was burned, caused
her to rise from her ashes and become a greater and a grander Chicago,
a wonder of the world.  Carter Harrison would not down.  He entered the
Democratic Convention and, with an audacity rarely equaled, in spite of
their protest, boldly declared himself their candidate.  Every
newspaper in Chicago, save the "Times," his own paper, bitterly opposed
his election: but notwithstanding all opposition, he was elected by
twenty thousand majority.  The aristocrats hated him, the moral element
feared him, but the poor people believed in him: he pandered to them,
flattered them, till they elected him.  While we would not by any means
hold Carter Harrison up to youth as a model, yet there is a great
lesson in his will-power and wonderful tenacity of purpose.

"The general of a large army may be defeated," said Confucius, "but you
cannot defeat the determined mind of a peasant."

The poor, deaf pauper, Kitto, who made shoes in the almshouse, and who
became the greatest of Biblical scholars, wrote in his journal, on the
threshold of manhood: "I am not myself a believer in impossibilities: I
think that all the fine stories about natural ability, etc., are mere
rigmarole, and that every man may, according to his opportunities and
industry, render himself almost anything he wishes to become."

Years ago, a young mechanic took a bath in the river Clyde.  While
swimming from shore to shore he discerned a beautiful bank,
uncultivated, and he then and there resolved to be the owner of it, and
to adorn it, and to build upon it the finest mansion in all the
borough, and name it in honor of the maiden to whom he was espoused.
"Last summer," says a well-known American, "I had the pleasure of
dining in that princely mansion, and receiving this fact from the lips
of the great shipbuilder of the Clyde."  That one purpose was made the
ruling passion of his life, and all the energies of his soul were put
in requisition for its accomplishment.

Lincoln is probably the most remarkable example on the pages of
history, showing the possibilities of our country.  From the poverty in
which he was born, through the rowdyism of a frontier town, the
rudeness of frontier society, the discouragement of early bankruptcy,
and the fluctuations of popular politics, he rose to the championship
of union and freedom.

Lincoln's will made his way.  When his friends nominated him as a
candidate for the legislature, his enemies made fun of him.  When
making his campaign speeches he wore a mixed jean coat so short that he
could not sit down on it, flax and tow-linen trousers, straw hat, and
pot-metal boots.  He had nothing in the world but character and friends.

When his friends suggested law to him, he laughed at the idea of his
being a lawyer.  He said he hadn't brains enough.  He read law barefoot
under the trees, his neighbors said, and he sometimes slept on the
counter in the store where he worked.  He had to borrow money to buy a
suit of clothes to make a respectable appearance in the legislature,
and walked to take his seat at Vandalia,--one hundred miles.  While he
was in the legislature, John F. Stuart, an eminent lawyer of
Springfield, told him how Clay had even inferior chances to his, had
got all of the education he had in a log schoolhouse without windows or
doors; and finally induced Lincoln to study law.

See Thurlow Weed, defying poverty and wading through the snow two
miles, with rags for shoes, to borrow a book to read before the
sap-bush fire.  See Locke, living on bread and water in a Dutch garret.
See Heyne, sleeping many a night on a barn floor with only a book for
his pillow.  See Samuel Drew, tightening his apron strings "in lieu of
a dinner."  See young Lord Eldon, before daylight copying Coke on
Littleton over and over again.  History is full of such examples.  He
who will pay the price for victory needs never fear final defeat.  Why
were the Roman legionaries victorious?

  "For Romans, in Rome's quarrels,
  Spared neither land nor gold,
  Nor son, nor wife, nor limb nor life,
  In the brave days of old."


Fowell Buxton, writing to one of his sons, says: "I am sure that a
young man may be very much what he pleases."

Dr. Mathews has well said that "there is hardly a word in the whole
human vocabulary which is more cruelly abused than the word 'luck.'  To
all the faults and failures of men, their positive sins and their less
culpable shortcomings, it is made to stand a godfather and sponsor.  Go
talk with the bankrupt man of business, who has swamped his fortune by
wild speculation, extravagance of living, or lack of energy, and you
will find that he vindicates his wonderful self-love by confounding the
steps which he took indiscreetly with those to which he was forced by
'circumstances,' and complacently regarding himself as the victim of
ill-luck.  Go visit the incarcerated criminal, who has imbued his hands
in the blood of his fellow-man, or who is guilty of less heinous
crimes, and you will find that, joining the temptations which were easy
to avoid with those which were comparatively irresistible, he has
hurriedly patched up a treaty with conscience, and stifles its
compunctious visitings by persuading himself that, from first to last,
he was the victim of circumstances.  Go talk with the mediocre in
talents and attainments, the weak-spirited man who, from lack of energy
and application, has made but little headway in the world, being
outstripped in the race of life by those whom he had despised as his
inferiors, and you will find that he, too, acknowledges the all-potent
power of luck, and soothes his humbled pride by deeming himself the
victim of ill-fortune.  In short, from the most venial offense to the
most flagrant, there is hardly any wrong act or neglect to which this
too fatally convenient word is not applied as a palliation."

Paris was in the hands of a mob, the authorities were panic-stricken,
for they did not dare to trust their underlings.  In came a man who
said, "I know a young officer who has the courage and ability to quell
this mob."  "Send for him; send for him; send for him," said they.
Napoleon was sent for, came, subjugated the mob, subjugated the
authorities, ruled France, then conquered Europe.

What a lesson is Napoleon's life for the sickly, wishy-washy, dwarfed,
sentimental "dudes," hanging about our cities, country, and
universities, complaining of their hard lot, dreaming of success, and
wondering why they are left in the rear in the great race of life.

Success in life is dependent largely upon the willpower, and whatever
weakens or impairs it diminishes success.  The will can be educated.
That which most easily becomes a habit in us is the will.  Learn, then,
to will decisively and strongly; thus fix your floating life, and leave
it no longer to be carried hither and thither, like a withered leaf, by
every wind that blows.  "It is not talent that men lack, it is the will
to labor; it is the purpose, not the power to produce."

It was this insatiable thirst for knowledge which held to his task,
through poverty and discouragement, John Leyden, a Scotch shepherd's
son.  Barefoot and alone, he walked six or eight miles daily to learn
to read, which was all the schooling he had.  His desire for an
education defied the extremest poverty, and no obstacle could turn him
from his purpose.  He was rich when he discovered a little bookstore,
and his thirsty soul would drink in the precious treasures from its
priceless volumes for hours, perfectly oblivious of the scanty meal of
bread and water which awaited him at his lowly lodging.  Nothing could
discourage him from trying to improve himself by study.  It seemed to
him that an opportunity to get at books and lectures was all that any
man could need.  Before he was nineteen, this poor shepherd boy with no
chance had astonished the professors of Edinburgh by his knowledge of
Greek and Latin.

Hearing that a surgeon's assistant in the Civil Service was wanted,
although he knew nothing whatever of medicine, he determined to apply
for it.  There were only six months before the place was to be filled,
but nothing could daunt him, and in six months' time he actually took
his degree with honor.  Walter Scott, who thought this one of the most
remarkable illustrations of perseverance, helped to fit him out, and he
sailed for India.

Webster was very poor even after he entered Dartmouth College.  A
friend sent him a recipe for greasing his boots.  Webster wrote and
thanked him, and added: "But my boots need other doctoring, for they
not only admit water, but even peas and gravel-stones."  Yet he became
one of the greatest men in the world.  Sydney Smith said: "Webster was
a living lie, because no man on earth could be as great as he looked."
Carlyle said of him: "One would incline at sight to back him against
the world."

What seemed to be luck followed Stephen Girard all his life.  No matter
what he did, it always seemed to others to turn to his account.  His
coming to Philadelphia seemed a lucky accident.  A sloop was seen one
morning off the mouth of Delaware Bay floating the flag of France and a
signal of distress.  Young Girard was captain of this sloop, and was on
his way to a Canadian port with freight from New Orleans.  An American
skipper, seeing his distress, went to his aid, but told him the
American war had broken out, and that the British cruisers were all
along the American coast, and would seize his vessel.  He told him his
only chance was to make a push for Philadelphia.  Girard did not know
the way, and had no money.  The skipper loaned him five dollars to get
the service of a pilot who demanded his money in advance.

His sloop passed into the Delaware just in time to avoid capture by a
British war vessel.  He sold the sloop and cargo in Philadelphia, and
began business on the capital.  Being a foreigner, unable to speak
English, short, stout, and with a repulsive face, blind in one eye, it
was hard for him to get a start.  But he was not the man to give up.
He had begun as a cabin boy at thirteen, and for nine years sailed
between Bordeaux and the French West Indies.  He improved every leisure
minute at sea, mastering the art of navigation.

At the age of eight he first discovered that he was blind in one eye.
His father, evidently thinking that he would never amount to anything,
would not help him to an education beyond that of mere reading and
writing, but sent his younger brothers to college.  The discovery of
his blindness, the neglect of his father, and the chagrin of his
brothers' advancement, soured his whole life.

When he began business for himself in Philadelphia, there seemed to be
nothing he would not do for money.  He bought and sold anything, from
groceries to old junk.  He bottled wine and cider, from which he made a
good profit.  Everything he touched prospered.  In 1780, he resumed the
New Orleans and St. Domingo trade, in which he had been engaged at the
breaking out of the Revolution.  Here great success again attended him.
He had two vessels lying in one of the St. Domingo ports when the great
insurrection on that island broke out.  A number of the rich planters
fled to his vessels with their valuables, which they left for safe
keeping while they went back to their estates to secure more.  They
probably fell victims to the cruel negroes, for they never returned,
and Girard was the lucky possessor of $50,000 which the goods brought
in Philadephia.

Everybody, especially his jealous brother merchants, attributed his
great success to his luck.  While undoubtedly he was fortunate in
happening to be at the right place at the right time, yet he was
precision, method, accuracy, energy itself.  He left nothing to chance.
His plans and schemes were worked out with mathematical care.  His
letters, written to his captains in foreign ports, laying out their
routes and giving detailed instruction from which they were never
allowed to deviate under any circumstances, are models of foresight and
systematic planning.  He never left anything of importance to others.
He was rigidly accurate in his instructions, and would not allow the
slightest departure from them.  He used to say that while his captains
might save him money by deviating from instructions once, yet they
would cause loss in ninety-nine other cases.  Once, when a captain
returned and had saved him several thousand dollars by buying his cargo
of cheese in another port than that in which he had been instructed to
buy, Girard was so enraged, although he was several thousand dollars
richer, that he discharged the captain on the spot, notwithstanding the
latter had been faithful in his service for many years, and thought he
was saving his employer a great deal of money by deviating from his
instructions.

Girard lived in a dingy little house, poorer than that occupied by many
of his employees.  He married a servant girl of great beauty, but she
proved totally unfitted for him, and died at last in the insane asylum.

Girard never lost a ship, and many times what brought financial ruin to
many others, as the War of 1812, only increased his wealth.  What
seemed luck with him was only good judgment and promptness in seizing
opportunities, and the greatest care and zeal in improving them to
their utmost possibilities.

Luck is not God's price for success: that is altogether too cheap, nor
does he dicker with men.

The mathematician tells you that if you throw the dice, there are
thirty chances to one against your turning up a particular number, and
a hundred to one against your repeating the same throw three times in
succession: and so on in an augmenting ratio.  What is luck?  Is it, as
has been suggested, a blind man's buff among the laws? a ruse among the
elements? a trick of Dame Nature?  Has any scholar defined luck? any
philosopher explained its nature? any chemist shown its composition?
Is luck that strange, nondescript fairy, that does all things among men
that they cannot account for?  If so, why does not luck make a fool
speak words of wisdom; an ignoramus utter lectures on philosophy?

Many a young man who has read the story of John Wanamaker's romantic
career has gained very little inspiration or help from it toward his
own elevation and advancement, for he looks upon it as the result of
good luck, chance, or fate.  "What a lucky fellow," he says to himself
as he reads; "what a bonanza he fell into."  But a careful analysis of
Wanamaker's life only enforces the same lesson taught by the analysis
of most great lives, namely, that a good mother, a good constitution,
the habit of hard work, indomitable energy, a determination which knows
no defeat, a decision which never wavers, a concentration which never
scatters its forces, courage which never falters, a self-mastery which
can say No, and stick to it, an "ignominious love of detail," strict
integrity and downright honesty, a cheerful disposition, unbounded
enthusiasm in one's calling, and a high aim and noble purpose insure a
very large measure of success.

Youth should be taught that there is something in circumstances; that
there is such a thing as a poor pedestrian happening to find no
obstruction in his way, and reaching the goal when a better walker
finds the drawbridge up, the street blockaded, and so fails to win the
race; that wealth often does place unworthy sons in high positions,
that family influence does gain a lawyer clients, a physician patients,
an ordinary scholar a good professorship; but that, on the other hand,
position, clients, patients, professorships, manager's and
superintendent's positions do not necessarily constitute success.  He
should be taught that in the long run, as a rule, _the best man does
win the best place_, and that persistent merit does succeed.

There is about as much chance of idleness and incapacity winning real
success, or a high position in life, as there would be in producing a
Paradise Lost by shaking up promiscuously the separate words of
Webster's Dictionary, and letting them fall at random on the floor.
Fortune smiles upon those who roll up their sleeves and put their
shoulders to the wheel; upon men who are not afraid of dreary, dry,
irksome drudgery, men of nerve and grit who do not turn aside for dirt
and detail.

The youth should be taught that "he alone is great, who, by a life
heroic, conquers fate;" that "diligence is the mother of good luck;"
that, nine times out of ten, what we call luck or fate is but a mere
bugbear of the indolent, the languid, the purposeless, the careless,
the indifferent; that the man who fails, as a rule, does not see or
seize his opportunity.  Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before
the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless can seize
her:--

  "In idle wishes fools supinely stay:
  Be there a will and wisdom finds a way."


It has been well said that the very reputation of being strong willed,
plucky, and indefatigable is of priceless value.  It often cows enemies
and dispels at the start opposition to one's undertakings which would
otherwise be formidable.

"If Eric's in robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of
his condition, and thirty years old at his departure from Greenland,"
says Emerson, "he will steer west and his ships will reach
Newfoundland.  But take Eric out and put in a stronger and bolder man,
and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred
miles further, and reach Labrador and New England.  There is no chance
in results."  Obstacles tower before the living man like mountain
chains, stopping his path and hindering his progress.  He surmounts
them by his energy.  He makes a new path over them.  He climbs upon
them to mountain heights.  They cannot stop him.  They do not much
delay him.  He transmutes difficulties into power, and makes temporary
failures into stepping-stones to ultimate success.

How many might have been giants who are only dwarfs.  How many a one
has died "with all his music in him."

It is astonishing what men who have come to their senses late in life
have accomplished by a sudden resolution.

Arkwright was fifty years of age when he began to learn English grammar
and improve his writing and spelling.  Benjamin Franklin was past fifty
before he began the study of science and philosophy.  Milton, in his
blindness, was past the age of fifty when he sat down to complete his
world-known epic, and Scott at fifty-five took up his pen to redeem an
enormous liability.  "Yet I am learning," said Michael Angelo, when
threescore years and ten were past, and he had long attained the
highest triumphs of his art.

Even brains are second in importance to will.  The vacillating man is
always pushed aside in the race of life.  It is only the weak and
vacillating who halt before adverse circumstances and obstacles.  A man
with an iron will, with a determination that nothing shall check his
career, if he has perseverance and grit, is sure to succeed.  We may
not find time for what we would like, but what we long for and strive
for with all our strength, we usually approximate if we do not fully
reach.  Hunger breaks through stone walls; stern necessity will find a
way or make one.

Success is also a great physical as well as mental tonic, and tends to
strengthen the will-power.  Dr. Johnson says: "Resolutions and success
reciprocally produce each other."  Strong-willed men, as a rule, are
successful men, and great success is almost impossible without it.

A man who can resolve vigorously upon a course of action, and turns
neither to the right nor the left, though a paradise tempt him, who
keeps his eyes upon the goal, whatever distracts him, is sure of
success.  We could almost classify successes and failures by their
various degrees of will-power.  Men like Sir James Mackintosh,
Coleridge, La Harpe, and many others who have dazzled the world with
their brilliancy, but who never accomplished a tithe of what they
attempted, who were always raising our expectations that they were
about to perform wonderful deeds, but who accomplished nothing worthy
of their abilities, have been deficient in will-power.  One talent with
a will behind it will accomplish more than ten without it.  The great
linguist of Bologna mastered a hundred languages by taking them singly,
as the lion fought the bulls.

I wish it were possible to show the youth of America the great part
that the will might play in their success in life and in their
happiness also.  The achievements of will-power are simply beyond
computation.  Scarcely anything in reason seems impossible to the man
who can will strong enough and long enough.

How often we see this illustrated in the case of a young woman who
suddenly becomes conscious that she is plain and unattractive; who, by
prodigious exercise of her will and untiring industry, resolves to
redeem herself from obscurity and commonness; and who not only makes up
for her deficiencies, but elevates herself into a prominence and
importance which mere personal attractions could never have given her.
Charlotte Cushman, without a charm of form or face, climbed to the very
top of her profession.  How many young men, stung by consciousness of
physical deformity or mental deficiencies, have, by a strong persistent
exercise of will-power, raised themselves from mediocrity and placed
themselves high above those who scorned them.

History is full of examples of men and women who have redeemed
themselves from disgrace, poverty, and misfortune, by the firm
resolution of an iron will.  The consciousness of being looked upon as
inferior, as incapable of accomplishing what others accomplish; the
sensitiveness at being considered a dunce in school, has stung many a
youth into a determination which has elevated him far above those who
laughed at him, as in the case of Newton, of Adam Clark, of Sheridan,
Wellington, Goldsmith, Dr. Chalmers, Curran, Disraeli, and hundreds of
others.  "Whatever you wish, that you are; for such is the force of the
human will, joined to the Divine, that whatever we wish to be
seriously, and with a true intention, that we become."  While this is
not strictly true, yet there is a deal of truth in it.

It is men like Mirabeau, who "trample upon impossibilities;" like
Napoleon, who do not wait for opportunities, but make them; like Grant,
who has only "unconditional surrender" for the enemy, who change the
very front of the world.  "We have but what we make, and every good is
locked by nature in a granite hand, sheer labor must unclench."

What cares Henry L. Bulwer for the suffocating cough, even though he
can scarcely speak above a whisper?  In the House of Commons he makes
his immortal speech on the Irish Church just the same.

"I can't, it is impossible," said a foiled lieutenant, to Alexander.
"Be gone," shouted the conquering Macedonian, "there is nothing
impossible to him who will try."

Were I called upon to express in a word the secret of so many failures
among those who started out in life with high hopes, I should say
unhesitatingly, they lacked will-power.  They could not half will.
What is a man without a will?  He is like an engine without steam, a
mere sport of chance, to be tossed about hither and thither, always at
the mercy of those who have wills.  I should call the strength of will
the test of a young man's possibilities.  Can he will strong enough,
and hold whatever he undertakes with an iron grip?  It is the iron grip
that takes the strong hold on life.  What chance is there in this
crowding, pushing, selfish, greedy world, where everything is pusher or
pushed, for a young man with no will, no grip on life?  "The truest
wisdom," said Napoleon, "is a resolute determination."  An iron will
without principle might produce a Napoleon; but with character it would
make a Wellington or a Grant, untarnished by ambition or avarice.

        "The undivided will
  'T is that compels the elements and wrings
  A human music from the indifferent air."




CHAPTER IV.

SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

Victories that are easy are cheap.  Those only are worth having which
come as the result of hard fighting.--BEECHER.

Man owes his growth chiefly to that active striving of the will, that
encounter with difficulty, which we call effort; and it is astonishing
to find how often results that seemed impracticable are thus made
possible.--EPES SARGENT.

I know no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as
that tenacity of purpose which, through all change of companions, or
parties, or fortunes, changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but
wearies out opposition and arrives at its port.--EMERSON.

  Yes, to this thought I hold with firm persistence;
  The last result of wisdom stamps it true;
  He only earns his freedom and existence
  Who daily conquers them anew.
        GOETHE.

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise
above them.--WASHINGTON IRVING.


"I have here three teams that I want to get over to Staten Island,"
said a boy of twelve one day in 1806 to the innkeeper at South Amboy,
N. J.  "If you will put us across, I'll leave with you one of my horses
in pawn, and if I don't send you back six dollars within forty-eight
hours you may keep the horse."

The innkeeper asked the reason for this novel proposition, and learned
that the lad's father had contracted to get the cargo of a vessel
stranded near Sandy Hook, and take it to New York in lighters.  The boy
had been sent with three wagons, six horses, and three men, to carry
the cargo across a sand-spit to the lighters.  The work accomplished,
he had started with only six dollars to travel a long distance home
over the Jersey sands, and reached South Amboy penniless.  "I'll do
it," said the innkeeper, as he looked into the bright honest eyes of
the boy.  The horse was soon redeemed.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

[Illustration: WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT]

How can you keep a determined man from success: Place stumbling-blocks
in his way, and he uses them for stepping-stones.  Imprison him, and he
produces the "Pilgrim's Progress."  Deprive him of eyesight, and he
writes the "Conquest of Mexico."

      *      *      *      *      *      *

"My son," said this same boy's mother, on the first of May, 1810, when
he asked her to lend him one hundred dollars to buy a boat, having
imbibed a strong liking for the sea; "on the twenty-seventh of this
month you will be sixteen years old.  If, by that time, you will plow,
harrow, and plant with corn the eight-acre lot, I will advance you the
money."  The field was rough and stony, but the work was done in time,
and well done.  From this small beginning Cornelius Vanderbilt laid the
foundation of a colossal fortune.  He would often work all night; and,
as he was never absent from his post by day, he soon had the best
business in New York harbor.

In 1813, when it was expected that New York would be attacked by
British ships, all the boatmen except Cornelius put in bids to convey
provisions to the military posts around New York, naming extremely low
rates, as the contractor would be exempted from military duty.  "Why
don't you send in a bid?" asked his father.  "Of what use?" replied
young Vanderbilt; "they are offering to do the work at half price.  It
can't be done at such rates."  "Well," said his father, "it can do no
harm to try for it."  So, to please his father, but with no hope of
success, Cornelius made an offer fair to both sides, but did not go to
hear the award.  When his companions had all returned with long faces,
he went to the commissary's office and asked if the contract had been
given.  "Oh, yes," was the reply; "that business is settled.  Cornelius
Vanderbilt is the man.  What?" he asked, seeing that the youth was
apparently thunderstruck, "is it you?"  "My name is Cornelius
Vanderbilt," said the boatman.  "Well," said the commissary, "don't you
know why we have given the contract to you?"  "No."  "Why, it is
because we want this business _done_, and we know you'll do it."
Character gives confidence.

In 1818 he owned two or three of the finest coasting schooners in New
York harbor, and had a capital of nine thousand dollars.  Seeing that
steam-vessels would soon win supremacy over those carrying sails only,
he gave up his fine business to become the captain of a steamboat at
one thousand dollars a year.  For twelve years he ran between New York
city and New Brunswick, N. J.  In 1829 he began business as a steamboat
owner, in the face of opposition so bitter that he lost his last
dollar.  But the tide turned, and he prospered so rapidly that he at
length owned over one hundred steamboats.  He early identified himself
with the growing railroad interests of the country, and became the
richest man of his day in America.

Barnum began the race of business life barefoot, for at the age of
fifteen he was obliged to buy on credit the shoes he wore at his
father's funeral.  He was a remarkable example of success under
difficulties.  There was no keeping him down; no opposition daunted
him, no obstacles were too great for him to overcome.  Think of a man
being ruined at fifty years of age; yes, worse than ruined, for he was
heavily in debt besides.  Yet on the very day of his downfall he begins
to rise again, wringing victory from defeat by his indomitable
persistence.

"Eloquence must have been born with you," said a friend to J. P.
Curran.  "Indeed, my dear sir, it was not," replied the orator, "it was
born some three and twenty years and some months after me."  Speaking
of his first attempt at a debating club, he said: "I stood up,
trembling through every fibre, but remembering that in this I was but
imitating Tully, I took courage and had actually proceeded almost as
far as 'Mr. Chairman,' when, to my astonishment and terror, I perceived
that every eye was turned on me.  There were only six or seven present,
and the room could not have contained as many more; yet was it, to my
panic-stricken imagination, as if I were the central object in nature,
and assembled millions were gazing upon me in breathless expectation.
I became dismayed and dumb.  My friends cried, 'Hear him!' but there
was nothing to hear."  He was nicknamed "Orator Mum," and well did he
deserve the title until he ventured to stare in astonishment at a
speaker who was "culminating chronology by the most preposterous
anachronisms."  "I doubt not," said the annoyed speaker, "that 'Orator
Mum' possesses wonderful talents for eloquence, but I would recommend
him to show it in future by some more popular method than his silence."
Stung by the taunt, Curran rose and gave the man a "piece of his mind,"
speaking quite fluently in his anger.  Encouraged by this success, he
took great pains to become a good speaker.  He corrected his habit of
stuttering by reading favorite passages aloud every day slowly and
distinctly, and spoke at every opportunity.

Bunyan wrote his "Pilgrim's Progress" on the untwisted papers used to
cork the bottles of milk brought for his meals.  Gifford wrote his
first copy of a mathematical work, when a cobbler's apprentice, on
small scraps of leather; and Rittenhouse, the astronomer, first
calculated eclipses on his plow handle.

A poor Irish lad, so pitted by smallpox that boys made sport of him,
earned his living by writing little ballads for street musicians.
Eight cents a day was often all he could earn.  He traveled through
France and Italy, begging his way by singing and playing the flute at
the cottages of the peasantry.  At twenty-eight he was penniless in
London, and lived in the beggars' quarters in Axe Lane.  In his
poverty, he set up as a doctor in the suburbs of London.  He wore a
second-hand coat of rusty velvet, with a patch on the left breast which
he adroitly covered with his three-cornered hat during his visits; and
we have an amusing anecdote of his contest of courtesy with a patient
who persisted in endeavoring to relieve him of his hat, which only made
him press it more devoutly to his heart.  He often had to pawn his
clothes to keep from starving.  He sold his "Life of Voltaire" for
twenty dollars.  After great hardship he managed to publish his "Polite
Learning in Europe," and this brought him to public notice.  Next came
"The Traveller," and the wretched man in a Fleet Street garret found
himself famous.  His landlady once arrested him for rent, but Dr.
Johnson came to his relief, took from his desk the manuscript of the
"Vicar of Wakefield," and sold it for three hundred dollars.  He spent
two years revising "The Deserted Village" after it was first written.
Generous to a fault, vain and improvident, imposed on by others, he was
continually in debt; although for his "History of the Earth and
Animated Nature" he received four thousand dollars, and some of his
works, as, for instance, "She Stoops to Conquer," had a large sale.
But in spite of fortune's frown and his own weakness, he won success
and fame.  The world, which so often comes too late with its assistance
and laurels, gave to the weak, gentle, loving author of "The Vicar of
Wakefield" a monument in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.

The poor, scrofulous, and almost blind boy, Samuel Johnson, was taken
by his mother to receive the touch of Queen Anne, which was supposed to
heal the "King's Evil."  He entered Oxford as a servant, copying
lectures from a student's notebooks, while the boys made sport of the
bare feet showing through great holes in his shoes.  Some one left a
pair of new shoes at his door, but he was too proud to be helped, and
threw them out of the window.  He was so poor that he was obliged to
leave college, and at twenty-six married a widow of forty-eight.  He
started a private school with his wife's money; but, getting only three
pupils, was obliged to close it.  He went to London, where he lived on
nine cents a day.  In his distress he wrote a poem in which appeared in
capital letters the line, "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed,"
which attracted wide attention.  He suffered greatly in London for
thirteen years, being arrested once for a debt of thirteen dollars.  At
forty he published "The Vanity of Human Wishes," in which were these
lines:--

  "Then mark what ills the scholar's life assail;
  Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail."

When asked how he felt about his failures, he replied:

"Like a monument,"--that is, steadfast, immovable.  He was an
indefatigable worker.  In the evenings of a single week he wrote
"Rasselas," a beautiful little story of the search for happiness, to
get money to pay the funeral expenses of his mother.  With six
assistants he worked seven years on his Dictionary, which made his
fortune.  His name was then in everybody's mouth, and when he no longer
needed help, assistance, as usual, came from every quarter.  The great
universities hastened to bestow their degrees, and King George invited
him to the palace.

Lord Mansfield raised himself by indefatigable industry from oatmeal
porridge and poverty to affluence and the Lord Chief Justice's Bench.

Of five thousand articles sent every year to "Lippincott's Magazine,"
only two hundred were accepted.  How much do you think Homer got for
his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise?  Only bitter bread and salt, and
going up and down other people's stairs.  In science, the man who
discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a
dungeon: the man who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died
from starvation, driven from his home.  It is very clear indeed that
God means all good work and talk to be done for nothing.  Shakespeare's
"Hamlet" was sold for about twenty-five dollars; but his autograph has
sold for five thousand dollars.

During the ten years in which he made his greatest discoveries, Isaac
Newton could hardly pay two shillings a week to the Royal Society of
which he was a member.  Some of his friends wanted to get him excused
from this payment, but he would not allow them to act.

There are no more interesting pages in biography than those which
record how Emerson, as a child, was unable to read the second volume of
a certain book, because his widowed mother could not afford the amount
(five cents) necessary to obtain it from the circulating library.

Linnaeus was so poor when getting his education, that he had to mend
his shoes with folded paper, and often had to beg his meals of his
friends.

Who in the days of the First Empire cared to recall the fact that
Napoleon, Emperor and King, was once forced to borrow a louis from
Talma, when he lived in a garret on the Quai Conti?

David Livingstone at ten years of age was put into a cotton factory
near Glasgow.  Out of his first week's wages he bought a Latin Grammar,
and studied in the night schools for years.  He would sit up and study
till midnight unless his mother drove him to bed, notwithstanding he
had to be at the factory at six in the morning.  He mastered Virgil and
Horace in this way, and read extensively, besides studying botany.  So
eager and thirsty for knowledge was he, that he would place his book
before him on the spinning-jenny, and amid the deafening roar of
machinery would pore over its pages.

George Eliot said of the years of close work upon her "Romola," "I
began it a young woman, I finished it an old woman."  One of Emerson's
biographers says, referring to his method of rewriting, revising,
correcting, and eliminating: "His apples were sorted over and over
again, until only the very rarest, the most perfect, were left.  It did
not matter that those thrown away were very good and helped to make
clear the possibilities of the orchard, they were unmercifully cast
aside."  Carlyle's books were literally wrung out of him.  The pains he
took to satisfy himself of a relatively insignificant fact were
incredible.  Before writing his essay on Diderot, he read twenty-five
volumes at the rate of one per day.  He tells Edward Fitzgerald that
for the twentieth time he is going over the confused records of the
battle of Naseby, that he may be quite sure of the topography.

"All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise and
wonder," says Johnson, "are instances of the resistless force of
perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that
distant countries are united with canals.  If a man was to compare the
effect of a single stroke of the pickaxe, or of one impression of the
spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed
by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations,
incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and
mountains are leveled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of
human beings."

The Rev. Eliphalet Nott, a pulpit orator, was especially noted for a
sermon on the death of Alexander Hamilton, the great statesman, who was
shot in a duel by Aaron Burr.  Although Nott had managed in some way to
get his degree at Brown University, he was at one time so poor after he
entered the ministry that he could not buy an overcoat.  His wife
sheared their only cosset sheep in January, wrapped it in burlap
blankets to keep it from freezing, carded and spun and wove the wool,
and made it into an overcoat for him.

Great men never wait for opportunities; they make them.  Nor do they
wait for facilities or favoring circumstances; they seize upon whatever
is at hand, work out their problem, and master the situation.  A young
man determined and willing will find a way or make one.  A Franklin
does not require elaborate apparatus; he can bring electricity from the
clouds with a common kite.  A Watt can make a model of the condensing
steam-engine out of an old syringe used to inject the arteries of dead
bodies previous to dissection.  A Dr. Black can discover latent heat
with a pan of water and two thermometers.  A Newton can unfold the
composition of light and the origin of colors with a prism, a lens, and
a piece of pasteboard.  A Humphry Davy can experiment with kitchen pots
and pans, and a Faraday can experiment on electricity by means of old
bottles, in his spare minutes while a book-binder.  When science was in
its cradle the Marquis of Worcester, an English nobleman, imprisoned in
the Tower of London, was certainly not in a very good position to do
anything for the world, but would not waste his time.  The cover of a
vessel of hot water blown on before his eyes led to a series of
observations, which he published later in a book called "Century of
Inventions."  These observations were a sort of text-book on the power
of steam, which resulted in Newcomen's steam-engine, which Watt
afterward perfected.  A Ferguson maps out the heavenly bodies, lying on
his back, by means of threads with beads stretched between himself and
the stars.

Not in his day of bodily strength and political power, but blind,
decrepit, and defeated with his party, Milton composed "Paradise Lost."

Great men have found no royal road to their triumph.  It is always the
old route, by way of industry and perseverance.

The farmer boy, Elihu B. Washburn, taught school at ten dollars per
month, and early learned the lesson that it takes one hundred cents to
make a dollar.  In after years he fought "steals" in Congress, until he
was called the "Watchdog of the Treasury."  From his long membership he
became known as the "Father of the House."  He administered the oath to
Schuyler Colfax as Speaker three times.  He recommended Grant as
colonel of a regiment of volunteers.  The latter, when President,
appointed him Secretary of State, and, later, Minister to France.
During the reign of the Commune, the representatives of nearly all
other foreign nations fled in dismay, but Washburn remained at his
post.  Shells exploded close to his office, and fell all around it, but
he did not leave even when Paris was in flames.  For a time he was
really the minister of all foreign countries, in Paris; and represented
Prussia for almost a year.  The Emperor William conferred upon him the
Order of the Red Eagle, and gave him a jeweled star of great value.

How could the poor boy, Elihu Burritt, working nearly all the daylight
in a blacksmith's shop, get an education?  He had but one book in his
library, and carried that in his hat.  But this boy with no chance
became one of America's wonders.

When teaching school, Garfield was very poor.  He tore his only blue
jean trousers, but concealed the rents by pins until night, when he
retired early that his boarding mistress might mend his clothes.  "When
you get to be a United States Senator," said she, "no one will ask what
kind of clothes you wore when teaching school."

Although Michael Angelo made himself immortal in three different
occupations, his fame might well rest upon his dome of St. Peter as an
architect, upon his "Moses" as a sculptor, and upon his "Last Judgment"
as a painter; yet we find by his correspondence now in the British
Museum, that when he was at work on his colossal bronze statue of Pope
Julius II., he was so poor that he could not have his younger brother
come to visit him at Bologna, because he had but one bed in which he
and three of his assistants slept together.

"I was always at the bottom of my purse," said Zola, in describing the
struggles of his early years of authorship.  "Very often I had not a
sou left, and not knowing, either, where to get one.  I rose generally
at four in the morning, and began to study after a breakfast consisting
of one raw egg.  But no matter, those were good times.  After taking a
walk along the quays, I entered my garret, and joyfully partaking of a
dinner of three apples, I sat down to work.  I wrote, and I was happy.
In winter I would allow myself no fire; wood was too expensive--only on
fête days was I able to afford it.  But I had several pipes of tobacco
and a candle for three sous.  A three-sous candle, only think of it!
It meant a whole night of literature to me."

James Brooks, once the editor and proprietor of the "New York Daily
Express," and later an eminent congressman, began life as a clerk in a
store in Maine, and when twenty-one received for his pay a hogshead of
New England rum.  He was so eager to go to college that he started for
Waterville with his trunk on his back, and when he was graduated he was
so poor and plucky that he carried his trunk on his back to the station
when he went home.

When Elias Howe, harassed by want and woe, was in London completing his
first sewing-machine, he had frequently to borrow money to live on.  He
bought beans and cooked them himself.  He also borrowed money to send
his wife back to America.  He sold his first machine for five pounds,
although it was worth fifty, and then he pawned his letters patent to
pay his expenses home.

The boy Arkwright begins barbering in a cellar, but dies worth a
million and a half.  The world treated his novelties just as it treats
everybody's novelties--made infinite objection, mustered all the
impediments, but he snapped his fingers at their objections, and lived
to become honored and wealthy.

There is scarcely a great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its
way to public recognition in the face of detraction, calumny, and
persecution.  "Everywhere," says Heine, "that a great soul gives
utterance to its thoughts, there also is a Golgotha."

Nearly every great discovery or invention that has blessed mankind has
had to fight its way to recognition, even against the opposition of the
most progressive men.

Even Sir Charles Napier fiercely opposed the introduction of steam
power into the Royal Navy.  In the House of Commons, he exclaimed, "Mr.
Speaker, when we enter Her Majesty's naval service and face the chances
of war, we go prepared to be hacked in pieces, to be riddled by
bullets, or to be blown to bits by shot and shell; but Mr. Speaker, we
do not go prepared to be boiled alive."  He said this with tremendous
emphasis.

"Will any one explain how there can be a light without a wick?" asked a
member of Parliament, when William Murdock, toward the close of the
eighteenth century, said that coal gas would give a good light, and
could be conveyed into buildings in pipes.  "Do you intend taking the
dome of St. Paul's for a gasometer?" was the sneering question of even
the great scientist, Humphry Davy.  Walter Scott ridiculed the idea of
lighting London by "smoke," but he soon used it at Abbotsford, and Davy
achieved one of his greatest triumphs by experimenting with gas until
he had invented his safety lamp.

Titian used to crush the flowers to get their color, and painted the
white walls of his father's cottage in Tyrol with all sorts of
pictures, at which the mountaineers gazed in wonder.

"That boy will beat me one day," said an old painter as he watched a
little fellow named Michael Angelo making drawings of pot and brushes,
easel and stool, and other articles in the studio.  The barefoot boy
did persevere until he had overcome every difficulty and become a
master of his art.

William H. Prescott was a remarkable example of what a boy with "no
chance" can do.  While at college, he lost one eye by a hard piece of
bread thrown during a "biscuit battle," then so common after meals;
and, from sympathy, the other eye became almost useless.  But the boy
had pluck and determination, and would not lead a useless life.  He set
his heart upon being a historian, and turned all his energies in that
direction.  By the aid of others' eyes, he spent ten years studying
before he even decided upon a particular theme for his first book.
Then he spent ten years more, poring over old archives and manuscripts,
before he published his "Ferdinand and Isabella."  What a lesson in his
life for young men!  What a rebuke to those who have thrown away their
opportunities and wasted their lives!

"Galileo with an opera-glass," said Emerson, "discovered a more
splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since with the
great telescopes.  Columbus found the new world in an undecked boat."

Surroundings which men call unfavorable cannot prevent the unfolding of
your powers.  From the plain fields and lowlands of Avon came the
Shakespearean genius which has charmed the world.  From among the
rock-ribbed hills of New Hampshire sprang the greatest of American
orators and statesmen, Daniel Webster.  From the crowded ranks of toil,
and homes to which luxury is a stranger, have often come the leaders
and benefactors of our race.  Indeed, when Christ came upon earth, His
early abode was a place so poor and so much despised that men thought
He could not be the Christ, asking, in utter astonishment, "Can any
good thing come out of Nazareth?"

"I once knew a little colored boy," said Frederick Douglass, "whose
mother and father died when he was but six years old.  He was a slave,
and had no one to care for him.  He slept on a dirt floor in a hovel,
and in cold weather would crawl into a meal-bag head foremost, and
leave his feet in the ashes to keep them warm.  Often he would roast an
ear of corn and eat it to satisfy his hunger, and many times has he
crawled under the barn or stable and secured eggs, which he would roast
in the fire and eat.  That boy did not wear pantaloons, as you do, but
a tow-linen shirt.  Schools were unknown to him, and he learned to
spell from an old Webster's spelling-book, and to read and write from
posters on cellar and barn doors, while boys and men would help him.
He would then preach and speak, and soon became well known.  He became
presidential elector, United States marshal, United States recorder,
United States diplomat, and accumulated some wealth.  He wore
broadcloth, and didn't have to divide crumbs with the dogs under the
table.  That boy was Frederick Douglass.  What was possible for me is
possible for you.  Don't think because you are colored you can't
accomplish anything.  Strive earnestly to add to your knowledge.  So
long as you remain in ignorance, so long will you fail to command the
respect of your fellow-men."

Where shall we find an illustration more impressive than in Abraham
Lincoln, whose life, career, and death might be chanted by a Greek
chorus as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial
theme of modern times?  Born as lowly as the Son of God, in a hovel; of
what real parentage we know not, reared in penury, squalor, with no
gleam of light, nor fair surrounding; a young manhood vexed by weird
dreams and visions; with scarcely a natural grace; singularly awkward,
ungainly even among the uncouth about him: it was reserved for this
remarkable character, late in life, to be snatched from obscurity,
raised to supreme command at a supreme moment, and intrusted with the
destiny of a nation.  The great leaders of his party were made to stand
aside; the most experienced and accomplished men of the day, men like
Seward, and Chase, and Sumner, statesmen famous and trained, were sent
to the rear, while this strange figure was brought by unseen hands to
the front, and given the reins of power.

The story is told of a man in London deprived of both legs and arms,
who managed to write with his mouth and perform other things so
remarkable as to enable him to earn a fair living.  He would lay
certain sheets of paper together, pinning them at the corner to make
them hold.  Then he would take a pen and write some verses; after which
he would proceed to embellish the lines by many skillful flourishes.
Dropping the pen from his mouth, he would next take up a needle and
thread, also with his mouth, thread the needle, and make several
stitches.  He also painted with a brush, and was in many other ways a
wonderful man.  Instead of being a burden to his family he was the most
important contributor to their welfare.

Arthur Cavanagh, M. P., was born without arms or legs, yet it is said
that he was a good shot, a skillful fisherman and sailor, and one of
the best cross country riders in Ireland.  He was a good
conversationalist, and an able member of Parliament.  He ate with his
fork attached to his stump of an arm, and wrote holding his pen in his
teeth.  In riding he held the bridle in his mouth, his body being
strapped to the saddle.  He once lost his means of support in India,
but went to work with his accustomed energy, and obtained employment as
a carrier of dispatches.

People thought it strange that Gladstone should appoint blind Henry
Fawcett Postmaster-General of Great Britain; but never before did any
one fill the office so well.

John B. Herreshoff, of Bristol, R. I., although blind since he was
fifteen years old, is the founder and head of one of the most noted
shipbuilding establishments in the world.  He has superintended the
construction of some of the swiftest torpedo boats and steam and
sailing yachts afloat.  He frequently takes his turn at the wheel in
sailing his vessels on trial trips.  He is aided greatly by his younger
brother Nathaniel, but can plan vessels and conduct business without
him.  After examining a vessel's hull or a good model of it, he will
give detailed instructions for building another just like it, and will
make a more accurate duplicate than can most boat-builders whose sight
is perfect.

The Rev. William H. Milburn, who lost his sight when a child, studied
for the ministry, and was ordained before he attained his majority.  In
ten years he traveled about 200,000 miles in missionary work.  He has
written half a dozen books, among them a very careful history of the
Mississippi Valley.  He has long been chaplain of the lower house of
Congress.

Blind Fanny Crosby, of New York, was a teacher of the blind for many
years.  She has written nearly three thousand hymns, among which are
"Pass Me not, O Gentle Saviour," "Rescue the Perishing," "Saviour more
than Life to Me," and "Jesus keep Me near the Cross."

Nor are these by any means the only examples of blind people now doing
their full share of the world's work.  In the United States alone there
are engaged in musical occupation one hundred and fifty blind piano
tuners, one hundred and fifty blind teachers of music in schools for
the blind, five hundred blind private teachers, one hundred blind
church organists, fifteen or more blind composers and publishers of
music, and several blind dealers in musical instruments.

_There is no open door to the temple of success_.  Every one who enters
makes his own door, which closes behind him to all others, not even
permitting his own children to pass.

Nearly forty years ago, on a rainy, dreary day in November, a young
widow in Philadelphia sat wondering how she could feed and clothe three
little ones left dependent by the death of her husband, a naval
officer.  Happening to think of a box of which her husband had spoken,
she opened it, and found therein an envelope containing directions for
a code of colored light signals to be used at night on the ocean.  The
system was not complete, but she perfected it, went to Washington, and
induced the Secretary of the Navy to give it a trial.  An admiral soon
wrote that the signals were good for nothing, although the idea was
valuable.  For months and years she worked, succeeding at last in
producing brilliant lights of different colors.  She was paid $20,000
for the right to manufacture them in our navy.  Nearly all the blockade
runners captured in the Civil War were taken by the aid of the Coston
signals, which are also considered invaluable in the Life Saving
Service.  Mrs. Coston introduced them into several European navies, and
became wealthy.

A modern writer says that it is one of the mysteries of our life that
genius, that noblest gift of God to man, is nourished by poverty.  Its
greatest works have been achieved by the sorrowing ones of the world in
tears and despair.  Not in the brilliant salon, not in the tapestried
library, not in ease and competence, is genius usually born and
nurtured; but often in adversity and destitution, amidst the harassing
cares of a straitened household, in bare and fireless garrets, with the
noise of squalid children, in the turbulence of domestic contentions,
and in the deep gloom of uncheered despair.  This is its most frequent
birthplace, and amid scenes like these unpropitious, repulsive,
wretched surroundings, have men labored, studied, and trained
themselves, until they have at last emanated from the gloom of that
obscurity the shining lights of their times; have become the companions
of kings, the guides and teachers of their kind, and exercised an
influence upon the thought of the world amounting to a species of
intellectual legislation.

Chauncey Jerome's education was limited to three months in the district
school each year until he was ten, when his father took him into his
blacksmith shop at Plymouth, Conn., to make nails.  Money was a scarce
article with young Chauncey.  He once chopped a load of wood for one
cent, and often chopped by moonlight for neighbors at less than a dime
a load.  His father died when he was eleven, and his mother was forced
to send Chauncey out, with tears in his eyes and a little bundle of
clothes in his hand, to earn a living on a farm.  His new employer kept
him at work early and late chopping down trees all day, his shoes
sometimes full of snow, for he had no boots until he was nearly
twenty-one.  At fourteen he was apprenticed for seven years to a
carpenter, who gave him only board and clothes.  Several times during
his apprenticeship he carried his tools thirty miles on his back to his
work at different places.  After he had learned his trade he frequently
walked thirty miles to a job with his kit upon his back.  One day he
heard people talking of Eli Terry, of Plymouth, who had undertaken to
make two hundred clocks in one lot.  "He'll never live long enough to
finish them," said one.  "If he should," said another, "he could not
possibly sell so many.  The very idea is ridiculous."  Chauncey
pondered long over this rumor, for it had long been his dream to become
a great clock-maker.  He tried his hand at the first opportunity, and
soon learned to make a wooden clock.  When he got an order to make
twelve at twelve dollars apiece he thought his fortune was made.  One
night he happened to think that a cheap clock could be made of brass as
well as of wood, and would not shrink, swell, or warp appreciably in
any climate.  He acted on the idea, and became the first great
manufacturer of brass clocks.  He made millions at the rate of six
hundred a day, exporting them to all parts of the globe.

"The History of the English People" was written while J. R. Green was
struggling against a mortal illness.  He had collected a vast store of
materials, and had begun to write, when his disease made a sudden and
startling progress, and his physicians said they could do nothing to
arrest it.  In the extremity of ruin and defeat he applied himself with
greater fidelity to his work.  The time that might still be left to him
for work must henceforth be wrested, day by day, from the grasp of
death.  The writing occupied five months, while from hour to hour and
day to day his life was prolonged, his doctors said, by the sheer force
of his own will and his inflexible determination to finish the "Making
of England."  He lay, too weak to lift a book, or to hold a pen,
dictating every word, sometimes through hours of intense suffering.
Yet so conscientious was he that, driven by death as he was, the
greater part of the book was rewritten five times.  When it was done he
began the "Conquest of England," wrote it, reviewed it, and then,
dissatisfied with it, rejected it all and began again.  As death laid
its cold fingers on his heart, he said: "I still have some work to do
that I know is good.  I will try to win but one week more to write it
down."  It was not until he was actually dying that he said, "I can
work no more."

"What does he know," said a sage, "who has not suffered?"  Schiller
produced his greatest tragedies in the midst of physical suffering
almost amounting to torture.  Handel was never greater than when,
warned by palsy of the approach of death, and struggling with distress
and suffering, he sat down to compose the great works which have made
his name immortal in music.  Mozart composed his great operas, and last
of all his "Requiem," when oppressed by debt and struggling with a
fatal disease.  Beethoven produced his greatest works amidst gloomy
sorrow, when oppressed by almost total deafness.

Perhaps no one ever battled harder to overcome obstacles which would
have disheartened most men than Demosthenes.  He had such a weak voice,
and such an impediment in his speech, and was so short of breath, that
he could scarcely get through a single sentence without stopping to
rest.  All his first attempts were nearly drowned by the hisses, jeers,
and scoffs of his audiences.  His first effort that met with success
was against his guardian, who had defrauded him, and whom he compelled
to refund a part of his fortune.  He was so discouraged by his defeats
that he determined to give up forever all attempts at oratory.  One of
his auditors, however, believed the young man had something in him, and
encouraged him to persevere.  He accordingly appeared again in public,
but was hissed down as before.  As he withdrew, hanging his head in
great confusion, a noted actor, Satyrus, encouraged him still further
to try to overcome his impediment.  He stammered so much that he could
not pronounce some of the letters at all, and his breath would give out
before he could get through a sentence.  Finally, he determined to be
an orator cost what it might.  He went to the seashore and practiced
amid the roar of the breakers with small pebbles in his mouth, in order
to overcome his stammering, and at the same time accustom himself to
the hisses and tumults of his audience.  He overcame his short breath
by practicing speaking while running up steep and difficult places on
the shore.  His awkward gestures were also corrected by long and
determined drill before a mirror.

Disheartened by the expense of removing the troublesome seeds, Southern
planters were seriously considering the abandonment of cotton culture.
To clean a pound of cotton required the labor of a slave for a day.
Eli Whitney, a young man from New England, teaching school in Georgia,
saw the state of affairs, and determined to invent a machine to do the
work.  He worked in secret for many months in a cellar, and at last
made a machine which cleaned the cotton perfectly and rapidly.  Just as
success crowned his long labor thieves broke into the cellar and stole
his model.  He recovered the model, but the principle was stolen, and
other machines were made without his consent.  In vain he tried to
protect his right in the courts, for Southern juries would almost
invariably decide against him.  He had started the South in a great
industry, and added millions to her wealth, yet the courts united with
the men who had infringed his patents to rob him of the reward of his
ingenuity and industry.  At last he abandoned the whole thing in
disgust, and turned his attention to making improvements in firearms,
and with such success that he accumulated a fortune.

Robert Collyer, who brought his bride in the steerage when he came to
America at the age of twenty-seven, worked at the anvil nine years in
Pennsylvania, and then became a preacher, soon winning national renown.

A shrewd observer says of John Chinaman: "No sooner does he put his
foot among strangers than he begins to work.  No office is too menial
or too laborious for him.  He has come to make money, and he will make
it.  His frugality requires but little: he barely lives, but he saves
what he gets; commences trade in the smallest possible way, and is
continually adding to his store.  The native scorns such drudgery, and
remains poor; the Chinaman toils patiently on, and grows rich.  A few
years pass by, and he has warehouses; becomes a contractor for produce;
buys foreign goods by the cargo; and employs his newly imported
countrymen, who have come to seek their fortune as he did.  He is not
particularly scrupulous in matters of opinion.  He never meddles with
politics, for they are dangerous and not profitable; but he will adopt
any creed, and carefully follow any observances, if, by so doing, he
can confirm or improve his position.  He thrives with the Spaniard, and
works while the latter sleeps.  He is too quick for the Dutchman, and
can smoke and bargain at the same time.  He has harder work with the
Englishman, but still he is too much for him, and succeeds.  Climate
has no effect on him: it cannot stop his hands, unless it kills him;
and if it does, he dies in harness, battling for money till his last
breath.  Whoever he may be, and in whatever position, whether in his
own or a foreign country, he is diligent, temperate, and uncomplaining.
He keeps the word he pledges, pays his debts, and is capable of noble
and generous actions.  It has been customary to speak lightly of him,
and to judge a whole people by a few vagabonds in a provincial seaport,
whose morals and manners have not been improved by foreign society."

Columbus was dismissed as a fool from court after court, but he pushed
his suit against an incredulous and ridiculing world.  Rebuffed by
kings, scorned by queens, he did not swerve a hair's breadth from the
overmastering purpose which dominated his soul.  The words "New World"
were graven upon his heart; and reputation, ease, pleasure, position,
life itself if need be, must be sacrificed.  Threats, ridicule,
ostracism, storms, leaky vessels, mutiny of sailors, could not shake
his mighty purpose.

You cannot keep a determined man from success.  Place stumbling-blocks
in his way and he takes them for stepping-stones, and on them will
climb to greatness.  Take away his money, and he makes spurs of his
poverty to urge him on.  Cripple him, and he writes the Waverley
Novels.  Lock him up in a dungeon, and he composes the immortal
"Pilgrim's Progress."  Put him in a cradle in a log cabin in the
wilderness of America, and in a few years you will find him in the
Capitol at the head of the greatest nation on the globe.

Would it were possible to convince the struggling youth of to-day that
all that is great and noble and true in the history of the world is the
result of infinite pains-taking, perpetual plodding, of common
every-day industry!

When Lavoisier the chemist asked that his execution might be postponed
for a few days in order to ascertain the results of the experiments he
was conducting in prison, the communists refused to grant the request,
saying: "The Republic has no need of philosophers."  Dr. Priestley's
house was burned and his chemical library destroyed by a mob shouting:
"No philosophers," and he was forced to flee from his country.  Bruno
was burned in Rome for revealing the heavens, and Versalius
[Transcriber's note: Vesalius?] was condemned for dissecting the human
body; but their names shall live as long as time shall last.  Kossuth
was two years in prison at Buda, but he kept on working, undaunted.
John Hunter said: "The few things I have been enabled to do have been
accomplished under the greatest difficulties, and have encountered the
greatest opposition."

Roger Bacon, one of the profoundest thinkers the world has produced,
was terribly persecuted for his studies in natural philosophy, yet he
persevered and won success.  He was accused of dealing in magic, his
books were burned in public, and he was kept in prison for ten years.
Even our own revered Washington was mobbed in the streets because he
would not pander to the clamor of the people and reject the treaty
which Mr. Jay had arranged with Great Britain.  But he remained firm,
and the people adopted his opinion.  The Duke of Wellington was mobbed
in the streets of London and his windows were broken while his wife lay
dead in the house; but the "Iron Duke" never faltered in his course, or
swerved a hair's breadth from his purpose.

William Phips, when a young man, heard some sailors on the street, in
Boston, talking about a Spanish ship, wrecked off the Bahama Islands,
which was supposed to have money on board.  Young Phips determined to
find it.  He set out at once, and, after many hardships, discovered the
lost treasure.  He then heard of another ship, wrecked off Port De La
Plata many years before.  He set sail for England and importuned
Charles II. for aid.  To his delight the king fitted up the ship Rose
Algier for him.  He searched and searched for a long time in vain.  He
had to return to England to repair his vessel.  James II. was then on
the throne, and he had to wait for four years before he could raise
money to return.  His crew mutinied and threatened to throw him
overboard, but he turned the ship's guns on them.  One day an Indian
diver went down for a curious sea plant and saw several cannon lying on
the bottom.  They proved to belong to the wreck for which he was
looking, sunk fifty years before.  He had nothing but dim traditions to
guide him, but he returned to England with $1,500,000.  The King made
him High Sheriff of New England, and he was afterward made Governor of
Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Ben Jonson, when following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's
Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket.  Joseph
Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a
druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons.  Dante and Descartes
were soldiers.  Andrew Johnson was a tailor.  Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe,
and Kirke White were butchers' sons.  Faraday was the son of a
blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an
apothecary.  Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a
tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker.  The boy Herschel played
the oboe for his meals.  Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave," rose
from the ranks.  His great industry gained for him the name of "The
Indefatigable."  Soult served fourteen years before he was made a
sergeant.  When made Foreign Minister of France he knew very little of
geography, even.  Richard Cobden was a boy in a London warehouse.  His
first speech in Parliament was a complete failure; but he was not
afraid of defeat, and soon became one of the greatest orators of his
day.  Seven shoemakers sat in Congress during the first century of our
government: Roger Sherman, Henry Wilson, Gideon Lee, William Graham,
John Halley, H. P. Baldwin, and Daniel Sheffey.

A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from
inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements.

The man who has not fought his way up to his own loaf, and does not
bear the scar of desperate conflict, does not know the highest meaning
of success.

The money acquired by those who have thus struggled upward to success
is not their only, or indeed their chief reward.  When, after years of
toil, of opposition, of ridicule, of repeated failure, Cyrus W. Field
placed his hand upon the telegraph instrument ticking a message under
the sea, think you that the electric thrill passed no further than the
tips of his fingers?  When Thomas A. Edison demonstrated in Menlo Park
that the electric light had at last been developed into a commercial
success, do you suppose those bright rays failed to illuminate the
inmost recesses of his soul?  Edward Everett said: "There are occasions
in life in which a great mind lives years of enjoyment in a single
moment.  I can fancy the emotion of Galileo when, first raising the
newly constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled the grand
prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent like the
moon.  It was such another moment as that when the immortal printers of
Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible into their
hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus, through
the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492, beheld the shores of San
Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself
to the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw, by the
stiffening fibres of the hemp cord of his kite, that he held the
lightning in his grasp, like that when Leverrier received back from
Berlin the tidings that the predicted planet was found."

"Observe yon tree in your neighbor's garden," says Zanoni to Viola in
Bulwer's novel.  "Look how it grows up, crooked and distorted.  Some
wind scattered the germ, from which it sprung, in the clefts of the
rock.  Choked up and walled round by crags and buildings, by nature and
man, its life has been one struggle for the light.  You see how it has
writhed and twisted,--how, meeting the barrier in one spot, it has
labored and worked, stem and branch, towards the clear skies at last.
What has preserved it through each disfavor of birth and
circumstances--why are its leaves as green and fair as those of the
vine behind you, which, with all its arms, can embrace the open
sunshine?  My child, because of the very instinct that impelled the
struggle,--because the labor for the light won to the light at length.
So with a gallant heart, through every adverse accident of sorrow, and
of fate, to turn to the sun, to strive for the heaven; this it is that
gives knowledge to the strong and happiness to the weak."

          "Each petty hand
  Can steer a ship becalmed; but he that will
  Govern her and carry her to her ends, must know
  His tides, his currents; how to shift his sails;
  What she will bear in foul, what in fair weathers;
  What her springs are, her leaks, and how to stop them;
  What strands, what shelves, what rocks to threaten her;
  The forces and the natures of all winds,
  Gusts, storms, and tempests; when her keel plows hell,
  And deck knocks heaven; then to manage her
  Becomes the name and office of a pilot."




CHAPTER V.

USES OF OBSTACLES.

Nature, when she adds difficulties, adds brains.--EMERSON.

Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous
difficulties.--SPURGEON.

  The good are better made by ill,
  As odors crushed are sweeter still.
        ROGERS.

  Aromatic plants bestow
  No spicy fragrance while they grow;
  But crushed or trodden to the ground,
  Diffuse their balmy sweets around.
        GOLDSMITH.

As night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.--YOUNG.

There is no possible success without some opposition as a fulcrum:
force is always aggressive and crowds something.--HOLMES.

The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the
more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will
be.--HORACE BUSHMILL.

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous
circumstances would have lain dormant.--HORACE.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of
adversity.--SIRACH.

  Though losses and crosses be lessons right severe,
  There's wit there ye'll get there, ye'll find no other where.
        BURNS.

Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens
it.--HAZLITT.

"Adversity is the prosperity of the great."

No man ever worked his way in a dead calm.--JOHN NEAL.

"Kites rise against, not with, the wind."


"Many and many a time since," said Harriet Martineau, referring to her
father's failure in business, "have we said that, but for that loss of
money, we might have lived on in the ordinary provincial method of
ladies with small means, sewing and economizing and growing narrower
every year; whereas, by being thrown, while it was yet time, on our own
resources, we have worked hard and usefully, won friends, reputation,
and independence, seen the world abundantly, abroad and at home; in
short, have truly lived instead of vegetating."

      *      *      *      *      *      *

[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN]

  "Sculptor of souls, I lift to Thee
    Encumbered heart and hands;
  Spare not the chisel, set me free,
    However dear the bands.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

"I do believe God wanted a grand poem of that man," said George
Macdonald of Milton, "and so blinded him that he might be able to write
it."

Two of the three greatest epic poets of the world were blind,--Homer
and Milton; while the third, Dante, was in his later years nearly, if
not altogether, blind.  It almost seems as though some great characters
had been physically crippled in certain respects so that they would not
dissipate their energy, but concentrate it all in one direction.

"I have been beaten, but not cast down," said Thiers, after making a
complete failure of his first speech in the Chamber of Deputies.  "I am
making my first essay in arms.  In the tribune, as under fire, a defeat
is as useful as a victory."

A distinguished investigator in science said that when he encountered
an apparently insuperable obstacle, he usually found himself upon the
brink of some discovery.

"Returned with thanks" has made many an author.  Failure often leads a
man to success by arousing his latent energy, by firing a dormant
purpose, by awakening powers which were sleeping.  Men of mettle turn
disappointments into helps as the oyster turns into pearl the sand
which annoys it.

"Let the adverse breath of criticism be to you only what the blast of
the storm wind is to the eagle,--a force against him that lifts him
higher."

A kite would not fly unless it had a string tying it down.  It is just
so in life.  The man who is tied down by half a dozen blooming
responsibilities and their mother will make a higher and stronger
flight than the bachelor who, having nothing to keep him steady, is
always floundering in the mud.  If you want to ascend in the world tie
yourself to somebody.

"It was the severe preparation for the subsequent harvest," said
Pemberton Leigh, the eminent English lawyer, speaking of his early
poverty and hard work.  "I learned to consider indefatigable labor as
the indispensable condition of success, pecuniary independence as
essential alike to virtue and happiness, and no sacrifice too great to
avoid the misery of debt."

When Napoleon's companions made sport of him on account of his humble
origin and poverty he devoted himself entirely to books, and soon
rising above them in scholarship, commanded their respect.  Soon he was
regarded as the brightest ornament of the class.

"To make his way at the bar," said an eminent jurist, "a young man must
live like a hermit and work like a horse.  There is nothing that does a
young lawyer so much good as to be half starved."

Thousands of men of great native ability have been lost to the world
because they have not had to wrestle with obstacles, and to struggle
under difficulties sufficient to stimulate into activity their dormant
powers.  No effort is too dear which helps us along the line of our
proper career.

Poverty and obscurity of origin may impede our progress, but it is only
like the obstruction of ice or debris in the river temporarily forcing
the water into eddies, where it accumulates strength and a mighty
reserve which ultimately sweeps the obstruction impetuously to the sea.
Poverty and obscurity are not insurmountable obstacles, but they often
act as a stimulus to the naturally indolent, and develop a firmer fibre
of mind, a stronger muscle and stamina of body.  If the germ of the
seed has to struggle to push its way up through the stones and hard
sod, to fight its way up to sunlight and air, and then to wrestle with
storm and tempest, with snow and frost, the fibre of its timber will be
all the tougher and stronger.

"Do you wish to live without a trial?" asks a modern teacher.  "Then
you wish to die but half a man.  Without trial you cannot guess at your
own strength.  Men do not learn to swim on a table.  They must go into
deep water and buffet the waves.  Hardship is the native soil of
manhood and self-reliance.  Trials are rough teachers, but rugged
schoolmasters make rugged pupils.  A man who goes through life
prosperous, and comes to his grave without a wrinkle, is not half a
man.  Difficulties are God's errands.  And when we are sent upon them
we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence.  We should reach after
the highest good."

"If you wish to rise," said Talleyrand, "make enemies."

There is good philosophy in the injunction to love our enemies, for
they are often our best friends in disguise.  They tell us the truth
when friends flatter.  Their biting sarcasm and scathing rebuke are
often mirrors which reveal us to ourselves.  These unkind stings and
thrusts are spurs which urge us on to grander success and nobler
endeavor.  Friends cover our faults and rarely rebuke; enemies drag out
to the light all our weaknesses without mercy.  We dread these thrusts
and exposures as we do the surgeon's knife, but are the better for
them.  They reach depths before untouched, and we are led to resolve to
redeem ourselves from scorn and inferiority.

We are the victors of our opponents.  They have developed in us the
very power by which we overcome them.  Without their opposition we
could never have braced and anchored and fortified ourselves, as the
oak is braced and anchored for its thousand battles with the tempests.
Our trials, our sorrows, and our griefs develop us in a similar way.

The man who has triumphed over difficulties bears the signs of victory
in his face.  An air of triumph is seen in every movement.

John Calvin, who made a theology for the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, was tortured with disease for many years, and so was Robert
Hall.  The great men who have lifted the world to a higher level were
not developed in easy circumstances, but were rocked in the cradle of
difficulties and pillowed on hardships.

"The gods look on no grander sight than an honest man struggling with
adversity."

"Then I must learn to sing better," said Anaximander, when told that
the very boys laughed at his singing.  Strong characters, like the
palm-tree, seem to thrive best when most abused.  Men who have stood up
bravely under great misfortune for years are often unable to bear
prosperity.  Their good fortune takes the spring out of their energy,
as the torrid zone enervates races accustomed to a vigorous climate.
Some people never come to themselves until baffled, rebuffed, thwarted,
defeated, crushed, in the opinion of those around them.  Trials unlock
their virtues; defeat is the threshold of their victory.

It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle
to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible; it is defeat that
has made those heroic natures that are now in the ascendency, and that
has given the sweet law of liberty instead of the bitter law of
oppression.

Difficulties call out great qualities, and make greatness possible.
How many centuries of peace would have developed a Grant?  Few knew
Lincoln until the great weight of the war showed his character.  A
century of peace would never have produced a Bismarck.  Perhaps
Phillips and Garrison would never have been known to history had it not
been for slavery.

"Will he not make a great painter?" was asked in regard to an artist
fresh from his Italian tour.  "No, never," replied Northcote.  "Why
not?"  "Because he has an income of six thousand pounds a year."  In
the sunshine of wealth a man is, as a rule, warped too much to become
an artist of high merit.  A drenching shower of adversity would
straighten his fibres out again.  He should have some great thwarting
difficulty to struggle against.

The best tools receive their temper from fire, their edge from
grinding; the noblest characters are developed in a similar way.  The
harder the diamond, the more brilliant the lustre, and the greater the
friction necessary to bring it out.  Only its own dust is hard enough
to make this most precious stone reveal its full beauty.

The spark in the flint would sleep forever but for friction; the fire
in man would never blaze but for antagonism.  The friction which
retards a train upon the track, robbing the engine of a fourth of its
power, is the very secret of locomotion.  Oil the track, remove the
friction, and the train will not move an inch.  The moment man is
relieved of opposition or friction, and the track of his life is oiled
with inherited wealth or other aids, that moment he often ceases to
struggle and therefore ceases to grow.

"It is this scantiness of means, this continual deficiency, this
constant hitch, this perpetual struggle to keep the head above water
and the wolf from the door, that keeps society from falling to pieces.
Let every man have a few more dollars than he wants, and anarchy would
follow."

Suddenly, with much jarring and jolting, an electric car came to a
standstill just in front of a heavy truck that was headed in an
opposite direction.  The huge truck wheels were sliding uselessly round
on the car tracks that were wet and slippery from rain.  All the urging
of the teamster and the straining of the horses in vain,--until the
motorman quietly tossed a shovelful of sand on the track under the
heavy wheels, then the truck lumbered on its way.  "Friction is a very
good thing," remarked a passenger.

The philosopher Kant observes that a dove, inasmuch as the only
obstacle it has to overcome is the resistance of the air, might suppose
that if only the air were out of the way it could fly with greater
rapidity and ease.  Yet if the air were withdrawn, and the bird should
try to fly in a vacuum, it would fall instantly to the ground unable to
fly at all.  The very element that offers the opposition to flying is
at the same time the condition of any flight whatever.

Rough seas and storms make sailors.  Emergencies make giant men.  But
for our Civil War the names of its grand heroes would not be written
among the greatest of our time.

The effort or struggle to climb to a higher place in life has strength
and dignity in it, and cannot fail to leave us stronger for the
struggle, even though we miss the prize.

From an aimless, idle, and useless brain, emergencies often call out
powers and virtues before unknown and suspected.  How often we see a
young man develop astounding ability and energy after the death of a
parent, or the loss of a fortune, or after some other calamity has
knocked the props and crutches from under him.  The prison has roused
the slumbering fire in many a noble mind.  "Robinson Crusoe" was
written in prison.  The "Pilgrim's Progress" appeared in Bedford Jail.
The "Life and Times" of Baxter, Eliot's "Monarchia of Man," and Penn's
"No Cross, No Crown," were written by prisoners.  Sir Walter Raleigh
wrote "The History of the World" during his imprisonment of thirteen
years.  Luther translated the Bible while confined in the Castle of
Wartburg.  For twenty years Dante worked in exile, and even under
sentence of death.  His works were burned in public after his death;
but genius will not burn.

Take two acorns from the same tree, as nearly alike as possible; plant
one on a hill by itself, and the other in the dense forest, and watch
them grow.  The oak standing alone is exposed to every storm.  Its
roots reach out in every direction, clutching the rocks and piercing
deep into the earth.  Every rootlet lends itself to steady the growing
giant, as if in anticipation of fierce conflict with the elements.
Sometimes its upward growth seems checked for years, but all the while
it has been expending its energy in pushing a root across a large rock
to gain a firmer anchorage.  Then it shoots proudly aloft again,
prepared to defy the hurricane.  The gales which sport so rudely with
its wide branches find more than their match, and only serve still
further to toughen every minutest fibre from pith to bark.

The acorn planted in the deep forest shoots up a weak, slender sapling.
Shielded by its neighbors, it feels no need of spreading its roots far
and wide for support.

Take two boys, as nearly alike as possible.  Place one in the country
away from the hothouse culture and refinements of the city, with only
the district school, the Sunday-school, and a few books.  Remove wealth
and props of every kind; and, if he has the right kind of material in
him, he will thrive.  Every obstacle overcome lends him strength for
the next conflict.  If he falls, he rises with more determination than
before.  Like a rubber ball, the harder the obstacle he meets the
higher he rebounds.  Obstacles and opposition are but apparatus of the
gymnasium in which the fibres of his manhood are developed.  He compels
respect and recognition from those who have ridiculed his poverty.  Put
the other boy in a Vanderbilt family.  Give him French and German
nurses; gratify every wish.  Place him under the tutelage of great
masters and send him to Harvard.  Give him thousands a year for
spending money, and let him travel extensively.

The two meet.  The city lad is ashamed of his country brother.  The
plain, threadbare clothes, hard hands, tawny face, and awkward manner
of the country boy make sorry contrast with the genteel appearance of
the other.  The poor boy bemoans his hard lot, regrets that he has "no
chance in life," and envies the city youth.  He thinks that it is a
cruel Providence that places such a wide gulf between them.  They meet
again as men, but how changed!  It is as easy to distinguish the
sturdy, self-made man from the one who has been propped up all his life
by wealth, position, and family influence, as it is for the shipbuilder
to tell the difference between the plank from the rugged mountain oak
and one from the sapling of the forest.  If you think there is no
difference, place each plank in the bottom of a ship, and test them in
a hurricane at sea.

When God wants to educate a man, he does not send him to school to the
Graces, but to the Necessities.  Through the pit and the dungeon Joseph
came to a throne.  We are not conscious of the mighty cravings of our
half divine humanity; we are not aware of the god within us until some
chasm yawns which must be filled, or till the rending asunder of our
affections forces us to become conscious of a need.  Paul in his Roman
cell; John Huss led to the stake at Constance; Tyndale dying in his
prison at Amsterdam; Milton, amid the incipient earthquake throes of
revolution, teaching two little boys in Aldgate Street; David
Livingstone, worn to a shadow, dying in a negro hut in Central Africa,
alone,--what failures they might all to themselves have seemed to be,
yet what mighty purposes was God working out by their apparent
humiliations!

Two highwaymen chancing once to pass a gibbet, one of them exclaimed:
"What a fine profession ours would be if there were no gibbets!"  "Tut,
you blockhead," replied the other, "gibbets are the making of us; for,
if there were no gibbets, every one would be a highwayman."  Just so
with every art, trade, or pursuit; it is the difficulties that scare
and keep out unworthy competitors.

"Success grows out of struggles to overcome difficulties," says Smiles.
"If there were no difficulties, there would be no success.  In this
necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human
advancement,--the advancement of individuals as of nations.  It has led
to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of the age."

"Stick your claws into me," said Mendelssohn to his critics when
entering the Birmingham orchestra.  "Don't tell me what you like but
what you don't like."

John Hunter said that the art of surgery would never advance until
professional men had the courage to publish their failures as well as
their successes.

"Young men need to be taught not to expect a perfectly smooth and easy
way to the objects of their endeavor or ambition," says Dr. Peabody.
"Seldom does one reach a position with which he has reason to be
satisfied without encountering difficulties and what might seem
discouragements.  But if they are properly met, they are not what they
seem, and may prove to be helps, not hindrances.  There is no more
helpful and profiting exercise than surmounting obstacles."

It is said that but for the disappointments of Dante, Florence would
have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries
continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there
will be ten of them, and more) would have had no "Divina Commedia" to
hear!

It was in the Madrid jail that Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote."  He was
so poor that he could not even get paper during the last of his
writing, and had to write on scraps of leather.  A rich Spaniard was
asked to help him, but the rich man replied: "Heaven forbid that his
necessities should be relieved, it is his poverty that makes the world
rich."

"A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from
inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements."

"She sings well," said a great musician of a promising but passionless
cantatrice, "but she wants something, and in that something,
everything.  If I were single, I would court her, I would marry her; I
would maltreat her; I would break her heart, and in six months she
would be the greatest singer in Europe."

"He has the stuff in him to make a good musician," said Beethoven of
Rossini, "if he had only been well flogged when a boy; but he is
spoiled by the ease with which he composes."

We do our best while fighting desperately to attain what the heart
covets.  Martin Luther did his greatest work, and built up his best
character, while engaged in sharp controversy with the Pope.  Later in
life his wife asks, "Doctor, how is it that whilst subject to Papacy we
prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the
utmost coldness and very seldom?"

When Lord Eldon was poor, Lord Thurlow withheld a promised
commissionership of bankruptcy, saying that it was a favor not to give
it then.  "What he meant was," said Eldon, "that he had learned I was
by nature very indolent, and it was only want that could make me very
industrious."

Waters says that the struggle to obtain knowledge and to advance one's
self in the world strengthens the mind, disciplines the faculties,
matures the judgment, promotes self-reliance, and gives one
independence of thought and force of character.

"The gods in bounty work up storms about us," says Addison, "that give
mankind occasion to exert their hidden strength, and throw out into
practice virtues that shun the day, and lie concealed in the smooth
seasons and the calms of life."

The hothouse plant may tempt a pampered appetite or shed a languid
odor, but the working world gets its food from fields of grain and
orchards waving in the sun and free air, from cattle that wrestle on
the plains, from fishes that struggle with currents of river or ocean;
its choicest perfumes from flowers that bloom unheeded, and in
wind-tossed forests finds its timber for temples and for ships.

"I do not see," says Emerson, "how any man can afford, for the sake of
his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake.
It is pearls and rubies to his discourse.  Drudgery, calamity,
exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom.  The true
scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by as a loss of
power."

Kossuth called himself "a tempest-tossed soul, whose eyes have been
sharpened by affliction."

Benjamin Franklin ran away, and George Law was turned out of doors.
Thrown upon their own resources, they early acquired the energy and
skill to overcome difficulties.

As soon as young eagles can fly the old birds tumble them out and tear
the down and feathers from their nest.  The rude and rough experience
of the eaglet fits him to become the bold king of birds, fierce and
expert in pursuing his prey.

Boys who are bound out, crowded out, kicked out, usually "turn out,"
while those who do not have these disadvantages frequently fail to
"come out."

"It was not the victories but the defeats of my life which have
strengthened me," said the aged Sidenham Poyntz.

Almost from the dawn of history, oppression has been the lot of the
Hebrews, yet they have given the world its noblest songs, its wisest
proverbs, its sweetest music.  With them persecution seems to bring
prosperity.  They thrive where others would starve.  They hold the
purse-strings of many nations.  To them hardship has been "like spring
mornings, frosty but kindly, the cold of which will kill the vermin,
but will let the plant live."

In one of the battles of the Crimea a cannon-ball struck inside the
fort, crashing through a beautiful garden.  But from the ugly chasm
there burst forth a spring of water which ever afterward flowed a
living fountain.  From the ugly gashes which misfortunes and sorrows
make in our hearts, perennial fountains of rich experience and new joys
often spring.

Don't lament and grieve over lost wealth.  The Creator may see
something grand and mighty which even He cannot bring out as long as
your wealth stands in the way.  You must throw away the crutches of
riches and stand upon your own feet, and develop the long unused
muscles of manhood.  God may see a rough diamond in you which only the
hard hits of poverty can polish.

God knows where the richest melodies of our lives are, and what drill
and what discipline are necessary to bring them out.  The frost, the
snows, the tempests, the lightnings, are the rough teachers that bring
the tiny acorn to the sturdy oak.  Fierce winters are as necessary to
it as long summers.  It is its half-century's struggle with the
elements for existence, wrestling with the storm, fighting for its life
from the moment that it leaves the acorn until it goes into the ship,
that gives it value.  Without this struggle it would have been
character-less, stamina-less, nerve-less, and its grain would have
never been susceptible of high polish.  The most beautiful as well as
the strongest woods are found not in tropical climates, but in the
severe climates, where they have to fight the frosts and the winter's
cold.

Many a man has never found himself until he has lost his all.
Adversity stripped him only to discover him.  Obstacles, hardships are
the chisel and mallet which shape the strong life into beauty.  The
rough ledge on the hillside complains of the drill, of the blasting
powder which disturbs its peace of centuries: it is not pleasant to be
rent with powder, to be hammered and squared by the quarryman.  But
look again: behold the magnificent statue, the monument, chiseled into
grace and beauty, telling its grand story of valor in the public square
for centuries.

The statue would have slept in the marble forever but for the blasting,
the chiseling, and the polishing.  The angel of our higher and nobler
selves would remain forever unknown in the rough quarries of our lives
but for the blastings of affliction, the chiseling of obstacles, and
the sand-papering of a thousand annoyances.

Who has not observed the patience, the calm endurance, the sweet
loveliness chiseled out of some rough life by the reversal of fortune
or by some terrible affliction.

How many business men have made their greatest strides toward manhood,
have developed their greatest virtues, when the reverses of fortune
have swept away everything they had in the world; when disease had
robbed them of all they held dear in life.  Often we cannot see the
angel in the quarry of our lives, the statue of manhood, until the
blasts of misfortune have rent the ledge, and difficulties and
obstacles have squared and chiseled the granite blocks into grace and
beauty.

Many a man has been ruined into salvation.  The lightning which smote
his dearest hopes opened up a new rift in his dark life, and gave him
glimpses of himself which, until then, he had never seen.

The grave buried his dearest hopes, but uncovered possibilities in his
nature of patience, endurance, and hope which he never dreamed he
possessed before.

"Adversity is a severe instructor," says Edmund Burke, "set over us by
one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better
too.  He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our
skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.  This conflict with difficulty
makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in
all its relations.  It will not suffer us to be superficial."

Men who have the right kind of material in them will assert their
personality, and rise in spite of a thousand adverse circumstances.
You cannot keep them down.  Every obstacle seems only to add to their
ability to get on.

"Under different circumstances," says Castelar, "Savonarola would
undoubtedly have been a good husband, a tender father, a man unknown to
history, utterly powerless to print upon the sands of time and upon the
human soul the deep trace which he has left, but misfortune came to
visit him, to crush his heart, and to impart that marked melancholy
which characterizes a soul in grief, and the grief that circled his
brows with a crown of thorns was also that which wreathed them with the
splendor of immortality.  His hopes were centred in the woman he loved,
his life was set upon the possession of her, and when her family
finally rejected him, partly on account of his profession, and partly
on account of his person, he believed that it was death that had come
upon him, when in truth it was immortality."

The greatest men will ever be those who have risen from the ranks.  It
is said that there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent,
and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.

The youth Opie earned his bread by sawing wood, but he reached a
professorship in the Royal Academy.  When but ten years old he showed
the material he was made of by a beautiful drawing on a shingle.
Antonio Canova was the son of a day laborer.  Thorwaldsen's parents
were poor, but, like hundreds of others, they did with their might what
their hands found to do, and ennobled their work.  They rose by being
greater than their calling, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering,
Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above
rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning.  By being first-class barbers,
tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power
which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen,
generals.

Adversity exasperates fools, dejects cowards, draws out the faculties
of the wise and industrious, puts the modest to the necessity of trying
their skill, awes the opulent, and makes the idle industrious.  Neither
do uninterrupted success and prosperity qualify men for usefulness and
happiness.  The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the
faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fortitude of
the voyager.  The martyrs of ancient times, in bracing their minds to
outward calamities, acquired a loftiness of purpose and a moral heroism
worth a lifetime of softness and security.  A man upon whom continuous
sunshine falls is like the earth in August: he becomes parched and dry
and hard and close-grained.  Men have drawn from adversity the elements
of greatness.  If you have the blues, go and see the poorest and
sickest families within your knowledge.  The darker the setting, the
brighter the diamond.  Don't run about and tell acquaintances that you
have been unfortunate; people do not like to have unfortunate men for
acquaintances.

Beethoven was almost totally deaf and burdened with sorrow when he
produced his greatest works.  Schiller wrote his best books in great
bodily suffering.  He was not free from pain for fifteen years.  Milton
wrote his leading productions when blind, poor, and sick.  "Who best
can suffer," said he, "best can do."  Bunyan said that, if it were
lawful, he could even pray for greater trouble, for the greater
comfort's sake.

"Do you know what God puts us on our backs for?" asked Dr. Payson,
smiling, as he lay sick in bed.  "No," replied the visitor.  "In order
that we may look upward."  "I am not come to condole but to rejoice
with you," said the friend, "for it seems to me that this is no time
for mourning."  "Well, I am glad to hear that," said Dr. Payson, "it is
not often I am addressed in such a way.  The fact is I never had less
need of condolence, and yet everybody persists in offering it; whereas,
when I was prosperous and well, and a successful preacher, and really
needed condolence, they flattered and congratulated me."

A German knight undertook to make an immense Aeolian harp by stretching
wires from tower to tower of his castle.  When he finished the harp it
was silent; but when the breezes began to blow he heard faint strains
like the murmuring of distant music.  At last a tempest arose and swept
with fury over his castle, and then rich and grand music came from the
wires.  Ordinary experiences do not seem to touch some lives--to bring
out any poetry, any higher manhood.

Not until the breath of the plague had blasted a hundred thousand
lives, and the great fire had licked up cheap, shabby, wicked London,
did she arise, phoenix-like, from her ashes and ruin, a grand and
mighty city.

True salamanders live best in the furnace of persecution.

"Every man who makes a fortune has been more than once a bankrupt, if
the truth were known," said Albion Tourgée.  "Grant's failure as a
subaltern made him commander-in-chief, and for myself, my failure to
accomplish what I set out to do led me to what I never had aspired to."

The appeal for volunteers in the great battle of life, in exterminating
ignorance and error, and planting high on an everlasting foundation the
banner of intelligence and right, is directed to _you_.  Burst the
trammels that impede your progress, and cling to hope.  Place high thy
standard, and with a firm tread and fearless eye press steadily onward.

Not ease, but effort, not facility, but difficulty, makes men.
Toilsome culture is the price of great success, and the slow growth of
a great character is one of its special necessities.  Many of our best
poets

  "Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
  And learn in suffering what they teach in song."


Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing
criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was
but nineteen years of age.  Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance
in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron
reached."  In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott,
Southey, and Campbell, and died at thirty-seven, that age so fatal to
genius.  Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or "Orator Mum,"
as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence

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