atin Grammar,
and studied in the night schools for years. He would sit up and study
till midnight unless his mother drove him to bed, notwithstanding he
had to be at the factory at six in the morning. He mastered Virgil and
Horace in this way, and read extensively, besides studying botany. So
eager and thirsty for knowledge was he, that he would place his book
before him on the spinning-jenny, and amid the deafening roar of
machinery would pore over its pages.

George Eliot said of the years of close work upon her "Romola," "I
began it a young woman, I finished it an old woman." One of Emerson's
biographers says, referring to his method of rewriting, revising,
correcting, and eliminating: "His apples were sorted over and over
again, until only the very rarest, the most perfect, were left. It did
not matter that those thrown away were very good and helped to make
clear the possibilities of the orchard, they were unmercifully cast
aside." Carlyle's books were literally wrung out of him. The pains he
took to satisfy himself of a relatively insignificant fact were
incredible. Before writing his essay on Diderot, he read twenty-five
volumes at the rate of one per day. He tells Edward Fitzgerald that
for the twentieth time he is going over the confused records of the
battle of Naseby, that he may be quite sure of the topography.

"All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise and
wonder," says Johnson, "are instances of the resistless force of
perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that
distant countries are united with canals. If a man was to compare the
effect of a single stroke of the pickaxe, or of one impression of the
spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed
by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations,
incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and
mountains are leveled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of
human beings."

The Rev. Eliphalet Nott, a pulpit orator, was especially noted for a
sermon on the death of Alexander Hamilton, the great statesman, who was
shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. Although Nott had managed in some way to
get his degree at Brown University, he was at one time so poor after he
entered the ministry that he could not buy an overcoat. His wife
sheared their only cosset sheep in January, wrapped it in burlap
blankets to keep it from freezing, carded and spun