and resolute and still,
And calm and self-possessed."

CONCENTRATED ENERGY.

The struggles and triumphs of those who are bound to win is a
never-ending tale. Nor will the procession of enthusiastic workers cease
so long as the globe is turning on its axle.

Say what we will of genius, specialized in a hundred callings, yet the
fact remains that no amount of genius has ever availed upon the earth
unless enforced by will power to overcome the obstacles that hedge about
every one who would rise above the circumstances in which he was born,
or become greater than his calling. Was not Virgil the son of a porter,
Horace of a shopkeeper, Demosthenes of a cutler, Milton of a money
scrivener, Shakespeare of a wool stapler, and Cromwell of a brewer?

[Illustration: THURLOW WEED,
American Journalist and Politician.
_b. Cairo, N.Y., 1797; d. New York, 1882_.]

Ben Jonson, when following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's Inn
in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter
was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist,
Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were
soldiers. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons.
Faraday was the son of a hostler, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an
apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel,
Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. They rose by
being greater than their callings, 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. John Kay, the inventor of the fly-shuttle, James Hargreaves,
who introduced the spinning-jenny, and Samuel Compton, who originated
mule-spinning, were all artisans, uneducated and poor, but were endowed
with natural faculties which enabled them to make a more enduring
impression upon the world than anything that could have been done by the
mere power of scholarship or wealth.

It cannot be said of any of these great names that their individual
courses in life would have been what they were, had there been lacking a
superb will power resistless as the tide to bear them upward and onward.

Let Fortune empty her whole quiver on me,
I have a soul tha