culars of
your character by refinements, by special studies, and practice; but,
once a man, and there is no more manliness to be lived for!

This thought kindles your soul to new and swifter dreams of ambition
than belonged to youth. They were toys; these are weapons. They were
fancies; these are motives. The soul begins to struggle with the dust,
the sloth, the circumstance, that beleaguer humanity, and to stagger
into the van of action.

Perception, whose limits lay along a narrow horizon, now tops that
horizon, and spreads, and reaches toward the heaven of the Infinite.
The mind feels its birth, and struggles toward the great birth-master.
The heart glows; its humanities even yield and crimple under the fierce
heat of mental pride. Vows leap upward, and pile rampart upon rampart to
scale all the degrees of human power.

Are there not times in every man's life when there flashes on him a
feeling--nay, more, an absolute conviction--that this soul is but a
spark belonging to some upper fire; and that, by as much as we draw near
by effort, by resolve, by intensity of endeavor, to that upper fire, by
so much we draw nearer to our home, and mate ourselves with angels? Is
there not a ringing desire in many minds to seize hold of what floats
above us in the universe of thought, and drag down what shreds we can to
scatter to the world? Is it not belonging to greatness to catch
lightning from the plains where lightning lives, and curb it for the
handling of men?

Resolve is what makes a man manliest;--not puny resolve, not crude
determination, not errant purpose, but that strong and indefatigable
will which treads down difficulties and danger as a boy treads down the
heaving frost-lands of winter,--which kindles his eye and brain with a
proud pulse-beat toward the unattainable. Will makes men giants. It made
Napoleon an emperor of kings, Bacon a fathomer of nature, Byron a tutor
of passion, and the martyrs masters of Death!

In this age of manhood you look back upon the dreams of the years that
are past: they glide to the vision in pompous procession; they seem
bloated with infancy. They are without sinew or bone. They do not bear
the hard touches of the man's hand.

It is not long, to be sure, since the summer of life ended with that
broken hope; but the few years that lie between have given long steps
upward. The little grief that threw its shadow, and the broken vision
that deluded you, have made the passing years lo