rpose in
his life to act as a burning glass to collect the brilliant rays of his
intellect, by which he might have dazzled the world. Most men have
ability enough, if they could only focalize it into one grand, central,
all-absorbing purpose, to accomplish great things.

"To encourage me in my efforts to cultivate the power of attention,"
said a friend of John C. Calhoun, "he stated that to this end he had
early subjected his mind to such a rigid course of discipline, and had
persisted without faltering until he had acquired a perfect control over
it; that he could now confine it to any subject as long as he pleased,
without wandering even for a moment; that it was his uniform habit,
when he set out alone to walk or ride, to select a subject for
reflection, and that he never suffered his attention to wander from it
until he was satisfied with its examination."

"My friend laughs at me because I have but one idea," said a learned
American chemist; "but I have learned that if I wish ever to make a
breach in a wall, I must play my guns continually upon one point."

"It is his will that has made him what he is," said an intimate friend
of Philip D. Armour, the Chicago millionaire. "He fixes his eye on
something ahead, and no matter what rises upon the right or the left he
never sees it. He goes straight in pursuit of the object ahead, and
overtakes it at last. He never gives up what he undertakes."

While Horace Greeley would devote a column of the New York _Tribune_ to
an article, Thurlow Weed would treat the same subject in a few words in
the Albany _Evening Journal_, and put the argument into such shape as to
carry far more conviction.

"If you would be pungent," says Southey, "be brief; for it is with words
as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed the deeper they burn."

"The only valuable kind of study," said Sydney Smith, "is to read so
heartily that dinner-time comes two hours before you expected it; to
sit with your Livy before you and hear the geese cackling that saved the
Capitol, and to see with your own eyes the Carthaginian sutlers
gathering up the rings of the Roman knights after the battle of Cannae,
and heaping them into bushels, and to be so intimately present at the
actions you are reading of, that when anybody knocks at the door it will
take you two or three seconds to determine whether you are in your own
study or on the plains of Lombardy, looking at Hannibal's weather-beaten
face and admirin