nence as Byron
reached." In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott,
Southey, and Campbell, and died at thirty-seven, that age so fatal to
genius. Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or "Orator Mum,"
as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence by ridicule and
abuse.

This is the crutch age. "Helps" and "aids" are advertised everywhere.
We have institutes, colleges, universities, teachers, books, libraries,
newspapers, magazines. Our thinking is done for us. Our problems are
all worked out in "explanations" and "keys." Our boys are too often
tutored through college with very little study. "Short roads" and
"abridged methods" are characteristic of the century. Ingenious
methods are used everywhere to get the drudgery out of the college
course. Newspapers give us our politics, and preachers our religion.
Self-help and self-reliance are getting old-fashioned. Nature, as if
conscious of delayed blessings, has rushed to man's relief with her
wondrous forces, and undertakes to do the world's drudgery and
emancipate him from Eden's curse.

But do not misinterpret her edict. She emancipates from the lower only
to call to the higher. She does not bid the world go and play while
she does the work. She emancipates the muscles only to employ the
brain and heart.

The most beautiful as well as the strongest characters are not
developed in warm climates, where man finds his bread ready made on
trees, and where exertion is a great effort, but rather in a trying
climate and on a stubborn soil. It is not chance that returns to the
Hindoo ryot a penny and to the American laborer a dollar for his daily
toil; that makes Mexico with its mineral wealth poor, and New England
with its granite and ice rich. It is rugged necessity, it is the
struggle to obtain; it is poverty, the priceless spur, that develops
the stamina of manhood, and calls the race out of barbarism.
Intelligent labor found the world a wilderness and has made it a garden.

As the sculptor thinks only of the angel imprisoned in the marble
block, so Nature cares only for the man or woman shut up in the human
being. The sculptor cares nothing for the block as such; Nature has
little regard for the mere lump of breathing clay. The sculptor will
chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel. Nature will
chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities. She
will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, hu