e sands of time and upon the
human soul the deep trace which he has left, but misfortune came to
visit him, to crush his heart, and to impart that marked melancholy
which characterizes a soul in grief, and the grief that circled his
brows with a crown of thorns was also that which wreathed them with the
splendor of immortality. His hopes were centred in the woman he loved,
his life was set upon the possession of her, and when her family
finally rejected him, partly on account of his profession, and partly
on account of his person, he believed that it was death that had come
upon him, when in truth it was immortality."

The greatest men will ever be those who have risen from the ranks. It
is said that there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent,
and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.

The youth Opie earned his bread by sawing wood, but he reached a
professorship in the Royal Academy. When but ten years old he showed
the material he was made of by a beautiful drawing on a shingle.
Antonio Canova was the son of a day laborer. Thorwaldsen's parents
were poor, but, like hundreds of others, they did with their might what
their hands found to do, and ennobled their work. They rose by being
greater than their calling, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering,
Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above
rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning. By being first-class barbers,
tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power
which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen,
generals.

Adversity exasperates fools, dejects cowards, draws out the faculties
of the wise and industrious, puts the modest to the necessity of trying
their skill, awes the opulent, and makes the idle industrious. Neither
do uninterrupted success and prosperity qualify men for usefulness and
happiness. The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the
faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fortitude of
the voyager. The martyrs of ancient times, in bracing their minds to
outward calamities, acquired a loftiness of purpose and a moral heroism
worth a lifetime of softness and security. A man upon whom continuous
sunshine falls is like the earth in August: he becomes parched and dry
and hard and close-grained. Men have drawn from adversity the elements
of greatness. If you have the blues, go and see the poorest and
sickest fami