e ever felt the aching of a single tooth
imagine what it must have been to suffer the same kind of pain over
the whole body. Surely this poor tortured wretch might have been
pardoned had he esteemed his life a failure! His spirit never flagged,
and he wrote the brightest, lightest mockeries that ever were framed
by the wit of man; his poems will be the delight of Europe for years
to come, and his memory can no more perish than that of Shakspere.

Enough of examples; the main fact is that to men and women who refuse
to accept failure all life is open, and there is something to hope for
even up to the verge of the grave. When the sullen storm-cloud of
misfortune lowers and life seems dim and dreary, that is the hour to
summon up courage, and to look persistently beyond the bounds of the
mournful present. Why should we uplift our voices in pettish
questioning? The blows that cut most cruelly are meant for our better
discipline, and, if we steel every nerve against the onset of despair,
the battle is half won even before we put forth a conscious effort.
There never yet was a misfortune or an array of misfortunes, there
never was an entanglement wound by malign chance from which a man
could not escape by dint of his own unaided energy. By all means let
us pity those who are sore beset amid the keen sorrows that haunt the
world, look with tenderness on their pain, soothe them in their
perplexities; but, before all things, incite them to struggle against
the numbing influence of despondency. The early failures are the raw
material of the finest successes; and the general who loses a battle,
the mechanic who fails to find work, the writer who pines for the
approach of tardy fame, the forsaken lover who looks out on a dark
universe, and the servant who meets only censure and coldness, despite
her attempts to fulfil her duty, all come under the same law. If they
consent to drift away into the limbo of failures, they have only to
resign themselves, and their existence will soon end in futility and
disaster; but, if they refuse to cringe under the lash of
circumstances, if they toil on as though a bright goal were
immediately before them, the result is almost assured; and, even if
they do succumb, they have the blessed knowledge that they have failed
gallantly. Half the misfortunes which crush the children of men into
insignificance are more or less magnified by imagination, and the
swollen bulk of trouble dwindles before an effort