ncentrated
age, cannot hope to succeed.

"Goods removed, messages taken, carpets beaten, and poetry composed on
any subject," was the sign of a man in London who was not very
successful at any of these lines of work, and reminds one of Monsieur
Kenard, of Paris, "a public scribe, who digests accounts, explains the
language of flowers, and sells fried potatoes."

The great difference between those who succeed and those who fail does
not consist in the amount of work done by each, but in the amount of
intelligent work. Many of those who fail most ignominiously do enough
to achieve grand success; but they labor at haphazard, building up with
one hand only to tear down with the other. They do not grasp
circumstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty
of turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough,
and time in abundance,--the warp and woof of success,--they are forever
throwing back and forth an empty shuttle, and the real web of life is
never woven.

If you ask one of them to state his aim and purpose in life, he will
say: "I hardly know yet for what I am best adapted, but I am a thorough
believer in genuine hard work, and I am determined to dig early and
late all my life, and I know I shall come across something--either
gold, silver, or at least iron." I say most emphatically, no. Would
an intelligent man dig up a whole continent to find its veins of silver
and gold? The man who is forever looking about to see what he can find
never finds anything. If we look for nothing in particular, we find
just that and no more. We find what we seek with all our heart. The
bee is not the only insect that visits the flower, but it is the only
one that carries honey away. It matters not how rich the materials we
have gleaned from the years of our study and toil in youth, if we go
out into life with no well-defined idea of our future work, there is no
happy conjunction of circumstances that will arrange them into an
imposing structure, and give it magnificent proportions.

"What a immense power over the life," says Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Ward, "is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress,
the look, the very motions of a person, define and alter when he or she
begins to live for a reason. I fancy that I can select, in a crowded
street, the busy, blessed women who support themselves. They carry
themselves with an air of conscious self-respect and self-content