the
magnificent strain,--victorious, triumphant, exultant,--

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
Sweet and honorable is it for country to die.

THE UNSUCCESSFUL

The unsuccessful men are all around us; and among them are those who
confound all distinctions set up by society, and illustrate the great
law of compensation set up by God, cutting society at right angles, and
obtuse angles, and acute angles, unnoticed, or but flippantly mentioned
by the careless, but giving food for intimate reflections to those for
whom things suggest thoughts.

Have you not seen them,--these unsuccessful men?--men who seem not to
have found their niche, but are always on somebody's hands for
settlement, or, if settled, never at rest? If they are poor, their
neighbors say, Why does he not learn a trade? or, Why does he not stick
to his trade? He might be well off, if he were not so flighty. He has
a good head-piece, but he potters rhymes; he tricks out toy-engines and
knick-knacks; he roams about the woods gathering snakes and toads; and
meanwhile he is out at the elbows. If he is rich, they say, Why does
he not make a career? He has great resources. His brain is
inexhaustible. He is equipped for any emergency. There is nothing
which he might not attain, if he would only apply himself, but he
fritters himself away. He sticks to nothing. He touches on this, that,
and the other, and falls off.

True, O Philosophers, he does stick to nothing, but condemn him not too
harshly. It is the old difficulty of the square man in the round hole,
and the round man in the square hole. They never did rest easy there
since time began, and never will. Many--perhaps the greater number--of
people have no overmastering inclination for any employment. They are
farmers because their fathers were before them, and that road was
graded for them,--or shoemakers, or lawyers, or ministers, for the same
reason. If circumstances had impelled them in a different direction,
they would have gone in a different direction, and been content. It is
not easy for them to conceive that a man is an indifferent lawyer,
because his raw material should have been worked up into a practical
engineer; or an unthrifty shoemaker, because he is a statesman nipped
in the bud. Yet such things are. Sometimes these men are gay, giddy,
rollicking fellows. Sometimes their faces are known at the
gaming-houses and the gin-palaces. Sometimes they go down quickl