success or failure of a life. A man may aspire to be the best billiard-player, the best jockey, the best coachman, the best wardroom politician, the best gambler, or the most cunning cheat. He may rise to be eminent in his calling; but, compared with other men, his greatest height will be below the level of the failure of him who chooses an honest profession. No jugglery of thought, no gorgeousness of trappings can make the low high-the dishonest honest the vile pure. As is a man's ideal or aspiration, so shall his life be. Some aspire to dress better than their neighbors, and live in finer houses, and drive better teams. How many women are as frivolous as the Empress Anne of Russia, who assembled the geniuses of her empire to build a palace of snow! "But," says Disraeli, “the youth who does not look up will look down, and the spirit that does not soar is destined perhaps to grovel." "Every man," says Theodore Parker, "has at times in his mind the ideal of what he should be, but is not. In all men that seek to improve, it is better than the actual character. No one is so satisfied with himself that he never wishes to be wiser, better, and more holy." What a discrepancy there is between what we are, or what we appear to be, and what we long to be. "Men are possessed of great and divine ideas and sentiments," said Dewey, "and to paint them, sculpture them, build them in architecture, sing them in music, utter them in eloquent speech, write them in books, in essays, sermons, poems, dramas, fictions, philosophies, histories, this is an irresistible impulse of human nature." 66 Ideality," says Horace Mann, "is only the avantcourier of the mind; and where that in a healthy and normal state goes, I hold it to be a prophecy that realization can follow." "Every really able man, if you talk sincerely with him," says Emerson, "considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this better, this flying ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator?" "Man can never come up to his ideal standard," says Margaret Fuller Ossoli. "It is the nature of the immortal spirit to raise that standard higher and higher as it goes from strength to strength, still upward and onward." "No true man can live a half life," says Phillips Brooks, "when he has genuinely learned that it is a half life. The other half, the higher half, must haunt him." "If I live," wrote Rufus Choate in his diary in September, 1844, "all blockheads which are shaken at certain mental peculiarities shall know and feel a reasoner, a lawyer, and a man of business." ""Tis not what a man does which exalts him," says Browning, "but what man would do." "It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive," says George Eliot. "There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them." "The flame of a common fire casts a shadow in the path of a kerosene light," says Emerson, "and this in turn casts a shadow before the electric flash. The country lad is satisfied with his surroundings until he goes to the village and sees the store, the library, the high school. This satisfies him until he goes to the city. The village lamp puts out the country light, and in turn is extinguished by Boston or New York." Our longings are the prophecies of our destinies. Life never wholly fulfills the expectations of youthful hope. The future can never pay all that the present promises. Providence holds back part of our wages, lest we quit work. The prophecy of immortality is written in our yearnings. "If the certainty of future fame bore Milton rejoicing through his blindness, or cheered Galileo in his dungeon," writes Bulwer, "what stronger and holier support shall not be given to him who has loved mankind as his brothers, and devoted his labors to their cause?—who has not sought, but relinquished, his own renown? - who has braved the present censures of men for their future benefit, and trampled upon glory in the energy of benevolence? Will there not be for him something more powerful than fame to comfort his sufferings and to sustain his hopes?" The ambition that comprehends another's welfare first, is the highest we can have. Such is the secret of Ruskin's success, and of the sway that Frances Willard holds in the hearts of every good woman in America and England. Yet to have one's name on the lips of men is not a worthy ambition. Some fast horses and prize-fighters are better known than those who have high and noble ideals. Every one knows the merits of the leading contestants in international yacht-races, but only a few, perhaps only one, knows the merits of him or her who surrendered hope, or perhaps life itself, to save a home, or keep a son from the poorhouse, or to reform tenement and prison methods. Of necessity the above illustrations come from the lives of those whom the world delights to honor; but glory is rare and of secondary importance, and the lack of it implies no thought of failure in the judgment of Him who looks beneath the frame into the heart who understands all aspiration and who measures with honest scales the fervor which the soul expends. O! who shall lightly say that Fame As, thinking of the mighty dead, The young from slothful couch shall start, "I wonder if ever a song was sung, But the singer's heart sang sweeter! I wonder if ever a hymn was rung, JOANNA BAILLIE But the thought surpassed the metre ! Till the cold stone echoed his ardent thought! |