his tongue had ever done. He shrank not from telling the dying Lorenzo to restore liberty to Florence and return what he had stolen from the people, before he would grant him absolution. Though the prince turned his face to the wall, rather than purchase forgiveness on such terms, Savonarola was inflexible, and the monarch died unabsolved. On the way to the scaffold, the bishop said, "I separate thee from the Church militant and triumphant." Savonarola corrected him, saying, "Not triumphant, that is not yours to do." "Heaven is probably a place for those who have failed on earth. The world will be blind indeed if it does not reckon among its great ones such martyrs as miss the palms but not the pains of martyrdom, heroes without laurels and conquerors without the jubilations of triumph." Uninterrupted successes at the beginning of a career are dangerous. Beware of the first great triumph. It may prove a failure. Many a man has been ruined by over-confidence born of his first victory. The mountain oak, tossed and swayed in the tempest until its proud top sweeps the earth, is all the stronger for its hundred battles with the elements if it only straighten up again. The danger is not in a fall, but in failing to rise. All the great work of the world has been accomplished by courage, and the world's greatest victories have been born of defeat. Every blessing that we enjoy — personal security, individual liberty, and constitutional freedom has been obtained through long apprenticeships of evil. The right of existing as a nation has only been accomplished through ages of wars and horrors. It required four centuries of martyrdom to establish Christianity, and a century of civil wars to introduce the Reformation. "There are some whom the lightning of fortune blasts, only to render holy," says Bulwer. "Amidst all that humbles and scathes - amidst all that shatters from their life its verdure, smites to the dust the pomp and summit of their pride, and in the very heart of existence writeth a sudden and strange defeature, they stand erect, — riven, not uprooted, a monument less of pity than of awe! There are some who pass through the lazar-house of misery with a step more august than a Cæsar's in his hall. The very things which, seen alone, are despicable and vile, associated with them be come almost venerable and divine; and one ray, however dim and feeble, of that intense holiness which, in the infant God, shed majesty over the manger and the straw, not denied to those who, in the depth of affliction, cherished his patient image, flings over the meanest localities of earth an emanation from the glory of Heaven!" Even from the dreary waste and desolation of his bereavement at Fordham, the stricken soul of Edgar A. Poe blossomed in those matchless flowers of funeral song, the delicately ethereal dirges, "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee," which alone would immortalize their author. To know how to wring victory from defeat, and make stepping-stones of our stumbling-blocks, is the secret of success. What matters it "If what shone afar so grand In the struggle, not the prize." Raphael died at thirty-seven, in the very flush of young manhood, before he had finished his "Transfiguration." Yet he had produced the finest picture in the world, and it was carried in his funeral procession, while all Rome mourned their great loss. Even the defeat of death found victorious voice in the unequaled requiem of Mozart. There is something sublime in the resolute, fixed purpose of suffering without complaining, which makes. disappointment often better than success. Constant success shows us only one side of the world; for as it surrounds us with friends who tell us only of our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom only we can learn our defects. Columbus was carried home in chains, on his third voyage, from the world he had discovered. Although the indignant people remonstrated, and his friend the queen had him set free, persecution followed him when he again crossed the Atlantic westward. At the age of seventy, after the "long wandering woe" of this fourth and final voyage, he was glad to reach Spain at last. He hoped for some reward—at least enough to keep soul and body together. But his appeals were fruitless. He lived for a few months after his return, poor, lonely, and stricken with a mortal disease. Even towards his death he was a scarcely tolerated beggar. He had to complain that his frock had been taken and sold, that he had not a roof of his own, and lacked wherewithal to pay his tavern bill. It was then that, with failing breath, he uttered the words, sublime in their touching simplicity, "I, a native of Genoa, discovered in the distant West, the continent and isles of India." He expired at Valladolid, May 20, 1506, his last words being, "Lord, I deliver my soul into thy hands." Thus Columbus died a neglected beggar, while a pickle-dealer of Seville, whose highest position was that of second mate of a vessel, gave his name to the greatest continent on the globe. But was the Genoese mariner a failure? Ask more than a hundred millions of people who inhabit the world he found a wilderness. Ask the grandest republic the sun ever shone upon if Columbus was a failure. Joan of Arc was burned alive at Rouen, without even a remonstrance from Charles VII., who owed her his Brown. Was the life of Joan of Arc a failure? Ask a nation besprinkled with her bronze and marble statues if the memory of the Maid of Orleans is not enshrined Frenchman's heart. in every 66 "A heroic Wallace, quartered upon the scaffold," said Carlyle, "cannot hinder that his Scotland become, one day, a part of England; but he does hinder that it become, on tyrannous, unfair terms, a part of it; commands still, as with a god's voice, from his old Valhalla and Temple of the brave, that there be a just, real union as of brother and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of slave and master." Leonidas and his three hundred may perish after defending a little mountain-pass against the vast Persian army for three days in hand to hand conflict; but their defeat shall prove a nation's victory, and they shall live in song and story when Xerxes and his vast horde will be remembered only because they were repulsed at Thermopyla and vanquished at Salamis and Platea. When the troop-laden English ship Birkenhead was found to be foundering in stress of weather, the officer in charge of the battalion ordered his men to stand at "parade rest" while the boats rowed away with the women and children. They kept their places as the water swashed higher and higher around their feet, and, when it reached their waists, unstrapped their belts and held aloft their cartridge-boxes until with a wild lurch the wreck went down. Think you there was no victory in this apparent defeat? Character is power and triumphs over physical weakness. "A man, true to man's grave religion," says Bulwer, 66 can no more despise a life wrecked in all else, while a hallowing affection stands out sublime through the rents and chinks of fortune, than he can profane with rude mockery a temple in ruins-if still left there the altar." The exertion of all your strength of mind or body may result in nothing but failure in the eyes of a crit ical world, but what you have done is already weighed in the scales of Omniscient Justice, and can in no way avoid its legitimate reward. Your deed is registered"In the rolls of Heaven, where it will live, A theme for angels when they celebrate The high-souled virtues which forgetful earth |