efuses facts, and reason
declines to create fictions. The mind is dull and dead. Suddenly the
step of some friend long absent is heard at the door. Then how do the
faculties awake! Through all the long winter evening, the mind brings
forth its treasures of wit, of anecdote, of instructive fact and
charming allusion. Here is some Edison, with an enthusiasm for
invention, who found his electric lamps that burned well for a month
had suddenly gone out, and read in the morning paper the judgment of
the scientist that his electric bulb was a good toy but a poor tool.

In his enthusiasm for his work, the man exclaimed, "I will make a
statue of that professor, and illumine him with electric lamps, and
make his ignorance memorable." Then Edison went away to begin a series
of experiments that drove sleep from his eyes and slumber from his
eyelids through five successive days and nights, until love and
enthusiasm helped reason to wrest victory from defeat.

Here is the boy Mozart, with his love of music, toiling through the
long days at tasks he hated, and in the darkening twilight stealing
into the old church, where he poured out his very soul over the organ
keys, sobbing out his mournful melodies. Here is Lincoln, with his
enthusiasm for books, coming in at night all aching with cold and wet,
and rising when parents slept, to roll another log upon the blazing
hearth, while midst the grateful heat his eager eyes searched out the
treasures that lay along the line of the printed page, until his mind
grew rich and strong. And here are the Scottish clansmen and patriots,
for love's sake, following the noble chieftain, their hearts all
aflame, who, if they had a hundred lives, would gladly have given them
all for their heroic leader. And here is the orator rising to plead
the cause of the savage, and of the slave, before men who feel no
sympathy, and are as castles locked and barred. But the love for the
poor shines in Wendell Phillips' eyes, trembles in his voice, pleads
in his thinking, until the multitude become all plastic to his
thought, and his smile becomes their smile, his tear their tear, the
throb of his heart the throb of the whole assembly. Here is the
Scottish girl, in love with truth, standing midst the sea, within the
clutches of the incoming tide. She is bound down midst the rising
waters. Doomed is she and soon must die. But her eyes are turned
upward toward the sky, and a great sweet light is on her face that
tell