and-fold. I think I would
rather cross the African continent again than undertake to write another
book."

"For the statistics of the negro population of South America alone,"
says Robert Dale Owen, "I examined more than a hundred and fifty
volumes."

Another author tells us that he wrote paragraphs and whole pages of his
book as many as fifty times.

It is said of one of Longfellow's poems that it was written in four
weeks, but that he spent six months in correcting and cutting it down.
Bulwer declared that he had rewritten some of his briefer productions as
many as eight or nine times before their publication. One of Tennyson's
pieces was rewritten fifty times. John Owen was twenty years on his
"Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews;" Gibbon on his "Decline and
Fall," twenty years; and Adam Clark, on his "Commentary," twenty-six
years. Carlyle spent fifteen years on his "Frederick the Great."

A great deal of time is consumed in reading before some books are
prepared. George Eliot read 1000 books before she wrote "Daniel
Deronda." Allison read 2000 before he completed his history. It is said
of another that he read 20,000 and wrote only two books.

Virgil spent several years on the Georgics, which could be printed in
two columns of an ordinary newspaper.

"Generally speaking," said Sydney Smith, "the life of all truly great
men has been a life of intense and incessant labor. They have commonly
passed the first half of life in the gross darkness of indigent
humility,--overlooked, mistaken, condemned by weaker men,--thinking
while others slept, reading while others rioted, feeling something
within them that told them they should not always be kept down among the
dregs of the world. And then, when their time has come, and some little
accident has given them their first occasion, they have burst out into
the light and glory of public life, rich with the spoils of time, and
mighty in all the labors and struggles of the mind."

Malibran said: "If I neglect my practice a day, I see the difference in
my execution; if for two days, my friends see it; and if for a week, all
the world knows my failure." Constant, persistent struggle she found to
be the price of her marvelous power.

"If I am building a mountain," said Confucius, "and stop before the last
basketful of earth is placed on the summit, I have failed."

"Young gentlemen," said Francis Wayland, "remember that nothing can
stand day's work."

America will