ness, success in ambition, is not success in life, though it may be
comprehended in it. Very few are the symmetrical lives. Very few of
us are working at the top of our bent. One may give scope to his
mechanical invention, but his poetry is cramped. One has his intellect
at high pressure, but the fires are out under his heart. One is the
bond-servant of love, and Pegasus becomes a dray-horse, Apollo must
keep the pot boiling, and Minerva is hurried with the fall sewing. So
we go, and above us the sun shines, and the stars throb; and beneath us
the snows, and the flowers, and the blind, instinctive earth; and over
all, and in all, God blessed forever.

Now, then, success being the best thing, we do well to strive for it;
but success being difficult to attain, if not unattainable, it remains
for us to wring from our failures all the sap and sustenance and succor
that are in them, if so be we may grow thereby to a finer and fuller
richness, and hear one day the rapturous voice bid us come up higher.

And be it remembered, what a man is, not what a man does, is the
measure of success. The deed is but the outflow of the soul. By their
fruits ye shall know THEM. The outward act has its inward
significance, though we may not always interpret it aright, and its
moral aspect depends upon the agent. "In vain," says Sir Thomas
Browne, "we admire the lustre of anything seen; that which is truly
glorious is invisible." Character, not condition, is the trust of life.
A man's own self is God's most valuable deposit with him. This is not
egotism, but the broadest benevolence. A man can do no good to the
world beyond himself. A stream can rise no higher than its fountain.
A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. If a man's soul is
stunted and gnarled and dwarfed, his actions will be. If his soul is
corrupt and base and petty, so will his actions be. Faith is the basis
of works. Essence underlies influence. If a man beget an hundred
children, and live many years, and his soul be not filled with good, I
say that an untimely birth is better than he.

When I see, as I sometimes do see, those whom the world calls
unsuccessful, furnished with every virtue and adorned with every grace,
made considerate through suffering, sympathetic by isolation,
spiritedly patient, meek, yet defiant, calm and contemptuous, tender
even of the sorrows and tolerant of the joys which they despise,
enduring the sympathy and accepting the co