, wrote the first
sentence in his "Republic" nine different ways before he was satisfied
with it. Burke wrote the conclusion of his speech at the trial of
Hastings sixteen times, and Butler his famous "Analogy" twenty times.
It took Vergil seven years to write his Georgics, and twelve years to
write the Aeneid. He was so displeased with the latter that he
attempted to rise from his deathbed to commit it to the flames.

Haydn was very poor; his father was a coachman and he, friendless and
lonely, married a servant girl. He was sent away from home to act as
errand boy for a music teacher. He absorbed a great deal of
information, but he had a hard life of persecution until he became a
barber in Vienna. Here he blacked boots for an influential man, who
became a friend to him. In 1798 this poor boy's oratorio, "The
Creation," came upon the musical world like the rising of a new sun
which never set. He was courted by princes and dined with kings and
queens; his reputation was made; there was no more barbering, no more
poverty. But of his eight hundred compositions, "The Creation"
eclipsed them all. He died while Napoleon's guns were bombarding
Vienna, some of the shot falling in his garden.

When a man like Lord Cavanagh, without arms or legs, manages to put
himself into Parliament, when a man like Francis Joseph Campbell, a
blind man, becomes a distinguished mathematician, a musician, and a
great philanthropist, we get a hint as to what it means to make the
most possible out of ourselves and our opportunities. Perhaps
ninety-nine of a hundred under such unfortunate circumstances would be
content to remain helpless objects of charity for life. If it is your
call to acquire money power instead of brain power, to acquire business
power instead of professional power, double your talent just the same,
no matter what it may be.

A glover's apprentice of Glasgow, Scotland, who was too poor to afford
even a candle or a fire, and who studied by the light of the shop
windows in the streets, and when the shops were closed climbed the
lamp-post, holding his book in one hand, and clinging to the lamp-post
with the other,--this poor boy, with less chance than almost any boy in
America, became the most eminent scholar of Scotland.

Francis Parkman, half blind, became one of America's greatest
historians in spite of everything, because he made himself such.
Personal value is a coin of one's own minting; one is taken at the
w