ies."

There is about as much chance of idleness and incapacity winning real
success, or a high position in life, as there would be in producing a
Paradise Lost by shaking up promiscuously the separate words of
Webster's Dictionary, and letting them fall at random on the floor.
Fortune smiles upon those who roll up their sleeves and put their
shoulders to the wheel; upon men who are not afraid of dreary, dry,
irksome drudgery, men of nerve and grit who do not turn aside for dirt
and detail.

"Is there one whom difficulties dishearten?" asked John Hunter. "He will
do little. Is there one who will conquer? That kind of a man never
fails."

"Circumstances," says Milton, "have rarely favored famous men. They have
fought their way to triumph through all sorts of opposing obstacles."

"We have a half belief," said Emerson, "that the person is possible who
can counterpoise all other persons. We believe that there may be a man
_who is a match for events_,--one who never found his match,--against
whom other men being dashed are broken,--one who can give you any odds
and beat you."

The simple truth is that a will strong enough to keep a man continually
striving for things not wholly beyond his powers will carry him in time
very far toward his chosen goal.

At nineteen Bayard Taylor walked to Philadelphia, thirty miles, to find
a publisher for fifteen of his poems. He wanted to see them printed in a
book; but no publisher would undertake it. He returned to his home
whistling, however, showing that his courage and resolution had not
abated.

In Europe he was often forced to live on twenty cents a day for weeks on
account of his poverty. He returned to London with only thirty cents
left. He tried to sell a poem of twelve hundred lines, which he had in
his knapsack, but no publisher wanted it. Of that time he wrote: "My
situation was about as hopeless as it is possible to conceive." But his
will defied circumstances and he rose above them. For two years he lived
on two hundred and fifty dollars a year in London, earning every dollar
of it with his pen.

His untimely death in 1879, at fifty-four, when Minister to Berlin, was
lamented by the learned and great of all countries.

We are told of a young New York inventor who about twenty years ago
spent every dollar he was worth in an experiment, which, if successful,
would introduce his invention to public notice and insure his fortune,
and, what he valued more, his usefulne