ifficult.

By finding out one's limitations is not meant, of course, what society
will permit you to do, or what men will permit you to do, but what
Nature will permit you to do. You have no other master than Nature.
Nature's limitations only are the bounds of your success. So far as
your success is concerned, no man, no set of men, no society, not even
all the world of humanity, is your master; but Nature is. "We cannot,"
says Emerson, "bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal
with persons."

"_Poeta nascitur, non fit_," is just as applicable to lawyers and
mechanics and engineers as to poets. More failures have been caused by
the old idea that a man may make himself what he will, than by any
single half-truth that has crept into our common speech and belief. A
man may make himself what he will within the limitations Nature has
set about him.

"When I was born,
From all the seas of strength
Fate filled a chalice,
Saying, This be thy portion, child,"

declares the Persian sage. But all that Hafiz means by that is that a
Paderewski shall not attempt blacksmithing, or a Rothschild try
cartooning or sculpture or watchmaking, or any man undertake that for
which Nature has not fitted him.

Do we not see instances every day of men made unhappy for life, and
their powers lost to the world by trying to do that for which they
have no aptitude? Parents obeying the attractive theory that any boy
can make himself what he pleases decide upon some ambitious career for
him without considering his natural abilities and efficiencies.
Usually some calling of clamorous conspicuity is selected.

Twenty years ago the law was the favorite avenue upon which fond
parents would thus set the feet of their offspring; the law, they
thought, would enable him better to "make his mark"--that is, to
parade up and down before the public eye and fill the public ear with
declamation. Even yet that profession has clientless members,
miserable in their hearts over their self-consciousness that they are
not lawyers and never can be lawyers, who would have been useful,
prosperous, and happy if they could have been permitted to be
architects or merchants or farmers or doctors or soldiers or sculptors
or editors or what not.

One of the cleverest of our present-day writers of fiction started out
to be a lawyer. But he could not keep his pen from paper nor restrain
that mysterious instrument from tracing sketches of charac