chest measurement
before breakfast. That is always the characteristic of good
resolutions. They are founded on a belief in the possibility of
performing miracles. If we could swell visibly as a result of a single
half-hour's tug at weights and wires, we would all desert our
morning's sleep for our exerciser with a will. But the faith that
believes in miracles is an easy sort of faith. The faith that goes on
believing in the final excellence, though one day shows no obvious
advance on another, is the more enviable genius. It is, perhaps, the
rarest thing in the world, and all the good resolutions ever made, if
placed end to end, would not make so much as an inch of it. One man I
knew who had faith of this kind. He used to practise strengthening his
will every evening by buying almonds and raisins or some sort of sweet
thing, and sitting down before them by the hour without touching them.
And frequently, so he told me, he would repeat over to himself a
passage which Poe quotes at the top of one of his stories--_The_
_Fall of the House of Ussher_, was it not?--beginning "Great are the
mysteries of the will." I envied him his philosophic grimness: I
should never have been able to resist the almonds and raisins. But
that incantation from Poe--was not that, too, but a desperate
clutching after the miraculous?

There is nothing which men desire more fervently than this mighty
will. It may be the most selfish or unselfish of desires. We may long
for it for its own sake or for the sake of some purpose which means
more to us than praise. We are eager to escape from that continuous
humiliation of the promises we have made to ourselves and broken. It
is all very well to talk about being baffled to fight better, but that
implies a will on the heroic scale. Most of us, as we see our
resolutions fly out into the sun, only to fall with broken wings
before they have more than begun their journey, are inclined at times
to relapse into despair. On the other hand, Nature is prodigal, and in
nothing so much as good resolutions. In spite of the experience of
half a lifetime of failure, we can still draw upon her for these with
the excitement of faith in our hearts. Perhaps there is some instinct
for perfection in us which thus makes us deny our past and stride off
into the future forgetful of our chains. It is the first step that
counts, says the proverb. Alas! we know that that is the step that
nearly everybody can take. It is when we are