boy
another you. One is enough," said Emerson. John Jacob Astor's father
wished his son to be his successor as a butcher, but the instinct of
commercial enterprise was too strong in the future merchant.

Nature never duplicates men. She breaks the pattern at every birth.
The magic combination is never used but once. Frederick the Great was
terribly abused because he had a passion for art and music and did not
care for military drill. His father hated the fine arts and imprisoned
him. He even contemplated killing his son, but his own death placed
Frederick on the throne at the age of twenty-eight. This boy, who,
because he loved art and music, was thought good for nothing, made
Prussia one of the greatest nations of Europe.

How stupid and clumsy is the blinking eagle at perch, but how keen his
glance, how steady and true his curves, when turning his powerful wing
against the clear blue sky!

Ignorant parents compelled the boy Arkwright to become a barber's
apprentice, but Nature had locked up in his brain a cunning device
destined to bless humanity and to do the drudgery of millions of
England's poor; so he must needs say "hands off" even to his parents,
as Christ said to his mother, "Wist ye not that I must be about my
Father's business?"

Galileo was set apart for a physician, but when compelled to study
anatomy and physiology, he would hide his Euclid and Archimedes and
stealthily work out the abstruse problems. He was only eighteen when
he discovered the principle of the pendulum in a lamp left swinging in
the cathedral at Pisa. He invented both the microscope and telescope,
enlarging knowledge of the vast and minute alike.

The parents of Michael Angelo had declared that no son of theirs should
ever follow the discreditable profession of an artist, and even
punished him for covering the walls and furniture with sketches; but
the fire burning in his breast was kindled by the Divine Artist, and
would not let him rest until he had immortalized himself in the
architecture of St. Peter's, in the marble of his Moses, and on the
walls of the Sistine Chapel.

Pascal's father determined that his son should teach the dead
languages, but the voice of mathematics drowned every other call,
haunting the boy until he laid aside his grammar for Euclid.

The father of Joshua Reynolds rebuked his son for drawing pictures, and
wrote on one: "Done by Joshua out of pure idleness." Yet this "idle
boy" became one of t