rown," 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.

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.

This is the crutch age. "Helps" and "aids" are advertised everywhere. We
have institutes, colleges, universities, teachers, books, libraries,
newspapers, magazines. Our thinking is done for us. Our problems are all
worked out in "explanations" and "keys." Our boys are too often tutored
through college with very little study. "Short roads" and "abridged
methods" are characteristic of the century. Ingenious methods are used
everywhere to get the drudgery out of the college course. Newspapers
give us our politics, and preachers our religion. Self-help and
self-reliance are getting old fashioned. Nature, as if conscious of
delayed blessings, has rushed to man's relief with her wondrous forces,
and undertakes to do the world's drudgery and emancipate him from Eden's
curse.

CHAPTER IX.

DEAD IN EARNEST.

It is the live coal that kindles others, not the dead. What
made Demosthenes the greatest of all orators was that he
appeared the most entirely possessed by the feelings he wished
to inspire. The effect p