CHAPTER XV. THE WILL AND THE WAY (continued). Pitch thy behavior low, thy projects high, So shall thou humble and magnanimous be. Sink not in spirit; who aimeth at the sky Shoots higher much than he that means a tree. Kites rise against, not with, the wind. passage anywhere in a dead calm. — JOHN NEAL. GEORGE HERBERT. No man ever worked his No man can end with being superior, who will not begin with being inferior. SYDNEY SMITH. "Les existences foibles vivent dans les douleurs au lieu de les changer en apothègmes d'expérience. Elles s'en saturent et s'usent en retrogradant chaque jour dans les malheurs consommés. Oublier, c'est le grand secret des existences fortes et créatrices, oublier à la manière de la Nature, qui ne se connait point de passé, qui recommence à toute heure les mystères de ses indefatigables enfantements." - A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.-E. P. WHIPPLE. ΟΤ NOT only perseverance is necessary to worldly success, but patience also, or a willingness to bide one's time. Indeed, of all the lessons that humanity has to learn in this school of the world, the hardest is to wait. Not to wait with folded hands that claim life's prizes without previous effort, but, having toiled and struggled, and crowded the slow years with trial, to see then no results, or perhaps disastrous results, and yet to stand firm, to preserve one's poise, and relax no effort, this, it has been truly said, is greatness, whether achieved by man or woman. The world cannot be circumnavigated by one wind. The grandest results cannot be achieved in a day; the fruits that are best worth plucking usually ripen the most slowly; and therefore every one who would gain a solid success must learn "to labor, and to wait." It is said that a tran scendentalist, after years of profound speculation, came to the conclusion "to accept the universe," an example which common natures would do well to imitate. As "temper is nine tenths of Christianity," so cheerfulness and steady labor are nine tenths of practical wisdom. A sunny disposition is the very soul of success, enabling a man to do double the labor that he could without it, and to do it with half the physical and mental exhaustion. Yet nothing is more common than for men to be dissatisfied with their callings, and grumble because they are chained to them by the necessity of getting a living. Losing all interest in their work, they go shifting about from this business to that, following nothing long enough to make it pay, but just long enough to see that it, too, has its thorns, perplexities, and vexations, and finally landing in the grave or the poor-house. While it is true that the round man sometimes gets into the square hole, yet, after having spent years in getting used to it, it is often better to remain there than to try to better himself. Generally there cannot be a greater error than to be constantly changing one's calling or business. As capital tends always to an equilibrium in profits, one kind of business pays in the long run just as well as another. Look around you, reader, among your acquaintances, and you will find that nearly all the successful men have stuck resolutely to one pursuit. Two lawyers, for example, begin to practise at the same time. One gives all his energies to his profession, lays in day by day a stock of legal learning, labors conscientiously upon the few cases he has, and waits patiently for years before he finds an opportunity to demonstrate his skill and erudition. The other, impatient of neglect and despairing of clients, plunges into politics, becomes an insurance agent, or engages in speculation. At the end of twenty years the latter will be without property and in debt, while the former will have a profitable and growing practice, and will count his thousands in bank stocks, government bonds, or mortgages. So in the mechanical professions. The same rest less, uneasy, discontented spirit which sends a mechanic from the East to the South, the Rocky Mountains, or California, renders continuous application anywhere irksome to him; and so he goes wandering about the world, a half-civilized Arab, getting the confidence of nobody, and almost sure to die insolvent. 66 Every man who would get on should try to put heart into everything that he does. Macaulay tells us that the political party to which Halifax belonged was the party which at that moment he liked least, because it was the party of which at that moment he had the nearest view; and so every calling has its peculiar cares, anxieties, and vexations, which seem more numerous and trying than those of any other. To fly from them is only to exchange them for a different and perhaps more teasing class. Troubles in some form are incident to man's imperfection. folly to search them out, and brood over and magnify them. 'Worry kills more men than work." The petty trials of life, if suffered to wear upon a man, often weaken more than great afflictions, as the ship that will survive a hard thump may be sunk by tiny insects boring through her timbers. There is nothing, it has been well said, like heart-varnish to cover up the innumerable evils and defects of life. Cultivate cheerfulness, then; the spectres of neglect, unkindness, and despair will fly before it as fogs before the sun. Is your situation uncongenial? Do as Sydney Smith did when laboring as a poor parish priest at Foston-le-Clay, in Yorkshire. "I am resolved," he said, "to like it, and reconcile myself to it, which is more manly than to feign myself above it, and to send up complaints by the post of being thrown away, and such like trash.' There is no pro It is therefore the very wantonness of fession so forbidding, no work so crabbed, that a man who strives to extract the utmost happiness from it may not twine about it the roses of fancy, and hide the most of its thorns. "There is always hope," says Carlyle, "in a man that actually and earnestly works. In idleness alone is there perpetual despair." History and biography abound with examples of signal patience shown by great men under trying circumstances. The Chinese tell of one of their countrymen, a student, who, disheartened by the difficulties in his way, threw down his book in despair; when, seeing a woman rubbing a crowbar on a stone, he inquired the reason, and was told that she wanted a needle, and thought she would rub down the crowbar till she got it small enough. Provoked by this example of patience to "try again," he resumed his studies, and became one of the three foremost scholars in the empire. The gentle words of Sir Isaac Newton to his dog Diamond, when it upset a lighted taper on his desk, by which the laborious calculations of years were destroyed, are familiar to all. A like mischance befell Thomas Carlyle, when he had finished the first volume of his French Revolution. He lent the manuscript to a friend for perusal, and it having been left, by some carelessness, on the parlor floor, the maid-of-all-work, finding what she supposed to be a bundle of waste paper, used it to light the kitchen and parlor fires. The first composition of the book had been a labor of love; the drudgery of rewriting it, with no help but memory, was contemplated by the author with a degree of anguish which it is not easy to conceive. Yet, without wasting time in plaints, he set resolutely to work, and at last triumphantly reproduced the book in the form in which it now appears. A similar anecdote is told of Robert Ainsworth, a celebrated writer and antiquary of the eighteenth century. He had toiled for years in compiling a voluminous dictionary of the Latin language, during which time he gave so little of his society to his wife, that, before he had quite completed the work, she committed it to the flames. Instead of abandoning himself to despair, he began at once to rewrite the book, which, with almost incredible labor, he finally accomplished. The patience of two of our own countrymen was put to an equally severe test. When Edward Livingston had finished his great code of Louisianian law, he had the anguish of beholding the labor of long years perish instantly in the flames ; yet he was not disheartened, but patiently recommenced and reperformed his herculean task. After Audubon had wandered and toiled for years to get accurate representations of American birds, he found that two Norwegian rats had in a night destroyed two hundred of his original drawings, containing the forms of more than a thousand of the inhabitants of the air. All were gone but a few bits of gnawed paper, upon which the thieving rascals had reared a family of their young. "The burning heat," says the noble-hearted sufferer, "which instantly rushed through my brain was too great to be endured without affecting the whole of my nervous system. I slept not for several nights, and the days passed like days of oblivion, until the animal powers being called into action, through the strength of my constitution, I took up my gun, my note-book, and my pencils, and went forward to the woods as gayly as if nothing had happened." He set to work again, pleased that he might now make better drawings than before, and in three years, by his indomitable energy, his portfolio was refilled. There are some professions and some places in which patience is peculiarly requisite to success. It is said that in London the faculty of sitting still on a chair is largely rewarded. Men obtain great emoluments because they are forty years of age and upwards. Medical men, we know, get trusted, simply because their names have appeared for twenty years on the same brass plates on the same weather-beaten doors. A young attorney's most brilliant speech stands but little chance by the side of a graybeard's prosy argument. Even this faculty of sitting still, however, often the hardest thing to do, can be educed only by culture; and, in general, the old adage is true, that there is no excellence or rare success without great labor. "Pigeons ready roasted," said the author of that exquisite musical composition, Midsummer Night's Dream, to a friend, "do not fly into the mouths of the most talented artists. As a rule, you must first catch, pluck, and roast them." Even the gold of Colorado exacts hard work. It cannot be picked up like the stones in the streets, nor is it to be coaxed out with kid gloves. |