ion is a slow and gradual process. At first, a
child thinks he can do everything. I remember when I thought I could
lift a house, if I would only try hard enough. So I began with the hind
wheel of a heavy old family-coach, built like that in which my Lady
Bountiful carried little King Pippin, if you happen to remember the
illustrations of that story. I lifted with all my might, and the planet
pulled down with all its might. The planet beat. After that, my ideas of
the difference between my will and my muscular force were more
accurately defined. Then came the illusion, that I could, of course,
"lick," "serve out," or "polish off," various small boys who had been or
might be obnoxious to me. The event of the different "set-tos" to
which, this hypothesis led not uniformly confirming it, another
limitation of my possibilities was the consequence. In this way I groped
along into a knowledge of my physical relations to the organic and
inorganic universe.

A man must be very stupid indeed, if, by the time he is fully ripened,
he does not know tolerably well what his physical powers are. His
weight, his height, his general development, his constitutional force,
his good or ill looks, he has had time to find out; and he is a fool, if
he does not carry a reasonable consciousness of these conditions with
him always. It is a little harder with the mind; but some qualities are
generally estimated fairly enough by their owners. Thus, a man may be
trusted when he says he has a good or a bad memory. Not so of his
opinion of his own judgment or imagination. It is only by a very slow
process that he finds out how much or how little of those qualities he
possesses. But it is one of the blessed privileges of growing older,
that we come to have a much clearer sense of what we can do and what we
cannot, and settle down to our work quietly, knowing what our tools are
and what we have to do with them.

Therefore, my friends, if I should at any time put on any airs on the
strength of your good-natured treatment, please to remember that these
are only the growth of that thin upper stratum of character I was
telling you of. I conceive that the fact of a man's coming out in a book
or two, even supposing them to have a success such as I should never
think of, is to the sum total of that man's life and character as the
bed of tulips and hyacinths you may see in spring, at the feet of the
"Great Elm," on our Boston Common, is to the solemn old tree