e,
and heaping them into bushels, and to be so intimately present at the
actions you are reading of, that when anybody knocks at the door it
will take you two or three seconds to determine whether you are in your
own study or on the plains of Lombardy, looking at Hannibal's
weather-beaten face and admiring the splendor of his single eye."

"The one serviceable, safe, certain, remunerative, attainable quality
in every study and pursuit is the quality of attention," said Charles
Dickens. "My own invention, or imagination, such as it is, I can most
truthfully assure you, would never have served me as it has, but for
the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging
attention." When asked on another occasion the secret of his success,
he said: "I never put one hand to anything on which I could throw my
whole self." "Be a whole man at everything," wrote Joseph Gurney to
his son, "a whole man at study, in work, and in play."

_Don't dally with your purpose_.

"I go at what I am about," said Charles Kingsley, "as if there was
nothing else in the world for the time being. That's the secret of all
hard-working men; but most of them can't carry it into their
amusements."

Many a man fails to become a great man by splitting into several small
ones, choosing to be a tolerable Jack-of-all-trades rather than to be
an unrivaled specialist.

"Many persons seeing me so much engaged in active life," said Edward
Bulwer Lytton, "and as much about the world as if I had never been a
student, have said to me, 'When do you get time to write all your
books? How on earth do you contrive to do so much work?' I shall
surprise you by the answer I made. The answer is this--'I contrive to
do so much by never doing too much at a time. A man to get through
work well must not overwork himself; or, if he do too much to-day, the
reaction of fatigue will come, and he will be obliged to do too little
to-morrow. Now, since I began really and earnestly to study, which was
not till I had left college and was actually in the world, I may
perhaps say that I have gone through as large a course of general
reading as most men of my time. I have traveled much and I have seen
much; I have mixed much in politics, and in the various business of
life; and in addition to all this, I have published somewhere about
sixty volumes, some upon subjects requiring much special research. And
what time do you think, as a general rule, I have devo