with his magnificent powers, disappointed the expectations of his
friends. He spread himself over the whole field of knowledge and
elegant culture; but the mention of the name of Everett does not call
up any one great achievement as does that of names like Garrison and
Phillips. Voltaire called the Frenchman La Harpe an oven which was
always heating, but which never cooked anything. Hartley Coleridge was
splendidly endowed with talent, but there was one fatal lack in his
character--he had no definite purpose, and his life was a failure.
Unstable as water, he could not excel. Southey, the uncle of
Coleridge, says of him: "Coleridge has two left hands." He was so
morbidly shy from living alone in his dreamland that he could not open
a letter without trembling. He would often rally from his purposeless
life, and resolve to redeem himself from the oblivion he saw staring
him in the face; but, like Sir James Mackintosh, he remained a man of
promise merely to the end of his life.

The man who succeeds has a program. He fires his course and adheres to
it. He lays his plans and executes them. He goes straight to his
goal. He is not pushed this way and that every time a difficulty is
thrown in his path; if he can not get over it he goes through it.
Constant and steady use of the faculties under a central purpose gives
strength and power, while the use of faculties without an aim or end
only weakens them. The mind must be focused on a definite end, or,
like machinery without a balance-wheel, it will rack itself to pieces.

This age of concentration calls, not for educated men merely, not for
talented men, not for geniuses, not for jacks-of-all-trades, but for
men who are trained to do one thing as well as it can be done.
Napoleon could go through the drill of his soldiers better than any one
of his men.

_Stick to your aim_. The constant changing of one's occupation is
fatal to all success. After a young man has spent five or six years in
a dry goods store, he concludes that he would rather sell groceries,
thereby throwing away five years of valuable experience which will be
of very little use to him in the grocery business; and so he spends a
large part of his life drifting around from one kind of employment to
another, learning part of each but all of none, forgetting that
experience is worth more to him than money and that the years devoted
to learning his trade or occupation are the most valuable.
Half-learned