I was advocating."

"Well, I've worked hard enough for it," said Malibran when a critic
expressed his admiration of her D in alt, reached by running up three
octaves from low D; "I've been chasing it for a month. I pursued it
everywhere,--when I was dressing, when I was doing my hair; and at last
I found it on the toe of a shoe that I was putting on."

"People smile at the enthusiasm of youth," said Charles Kingsley; "that
enthusiasm which they themselves secretly look back at with a sigh,
perhaps unconscious that it is partly their own fault that they ever
lost it."

"Should I die this minute," said Nelson at an important crisis, "want of
frigates would be found written on my heart."

Said Dr. Arnold, the celebrated instructor: "I feel more and more the
need of intercourse with men who take life in earnest. It is painful to
me to be always on the surface of things. Not that I wish for much of
what is called religious conversation. That is often apt to be on the
surface. But I want a sign which one catches by a sort of masonry, that
a man knows what he is about in life. When I find this it opens my heart
with as fresh a sympathy as when I was twenty years younger."

Archimedes, the greatest geometer of antiquity, was consulted by the
king in regard to a gold crown suspected of being fraudulently alloyed
with silver. While considering the best method of detecting any fraud,
he plunged into a full bathing tub; and, with the thought that the water
that overflowed must be equal in weight to his body, he discovered the
method of obtaining the bulk of the crown compared with an equally
heavy mass of pure gold. Excited by the discovery, he ran through the
streets undressed, crying, "I have found it."

Equally celebrated is his remark, "Give me where to stand and I will
move the world."

His only remark to the Roman soldier who entered his room while engaged
in geometrical study, was, "Don't step on my circle."

Refusing to follow the soldier to Marcellus, who had captured the city,
he was killed on the spot. He is said to have remarked, "My head, but
not my circle."

"Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world," says
Emerson, "is the triumph of some enthusiasm. The victories of the Arabs
after Mahomet, who, in a few years, from a small and mean beginning,
established a larger empire than that of Rome, is an example. They did
they knew not what. The naked Derar, horsed on an idea, was found an
overm