CHAPTER XV.

THE PRICE OF SUCCESS.

The gods sell anything and to everybody at a fair price. - EMERSON. To color well requires your life. It cannot be done cheaper.—Ruskin. There is no fate! Between the thought and the success, God is the only agent. BULWER.

"We have but what we make, and every good

Is locked by nature in a granite hand,

Sheer labor must unclench.”

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

To be thrown upon one's own resources is to be cast into the very lap of fortune. FRANKLIN.

Heaven never helps the man who will not act.

SOPHOCLES.

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, nd doing well whatever you do, without a thought of fame. — LONG

FELLOW.

There is no road to success but through a clear, strong purpose. A purpose underlies character, culture, position, attainment of whatever sort. T. T. MUNGER.

Mankind worships success, but thinks too little of the means by which it is attained, what days and nights of watching and weariness, how year after year has dragged on, and seen the end still far off; all that counts for little, if the long struggle do not close in victory. -H. M. FIELD.

"WHAT a heavenly mournful expression!" exclaims Miss Sybil in Bulwer's "Kenelm Chillingly," as she gazes at the baby; "it seems so grieved to have left the angels!"

"That is prettily said, cousin Sybil," replied the clergyman, "but the infant must pluck up courage and fight its way among mortals with a good heart, if it wants to get back to the angels again."

The same principle obtains in the performance of even trivial tasks.

An ancient Greek thought to save his bees a laborious

"What hath God wrought." (First telegraphic message.) "A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements."

flight to Hymettus. He cut their wings and gathered flowers for them to work upon at home, but they made no honey.

"Oh, if I could thus put a dream on canvas!" ex claimed an enthusiastic young artist, pointing to a most beautiful painting. "Dream on canvas!" growled the master, "it is the ten thousand touches with the brush you must learn to put on canvas that make your dream."

"Not so very long to do the work itself," said a great artist, when asked the time required to paint a cottage scene with an old woman trying to thread a needle near the open door, "but it took me twenty years to get that pose of the figure, and to correctly represent that sunlight coming in at the door."

"You charge me fifty sequins," said a Venetian noble. man to a sculptor, "for a bust that cost you only ten days' labor." "You forget," said the artist, "that I have been thirty years learning to make that bust in ten days."

"If only Milton's imagination could have conceived his visions," says Waters, "his consummate industry alone could have carved the immortal lines which enshrine them. If only Newton's mind could reach out to the secrets of nature, even his genius could only do it by the homeliest toil. The works of Bacon are not mid summer's-night dreams, but, like coral islands, they have risen from the depths of truth, and formed their broad surfaces above the ocean by the minutest accre tions of persevering labor. The conceptions of Michael Angelo would have perished like a night's phantasy, had not his industry given them permanence."

"There is but one method of attaining excellence," said Sydney Smith, "and that is hard labor."

The mottoes of great men often give us glimpses of the secret of their characters and success. "Work! work! work!" was the motto of Sir Joshua Reynolds

David Wilkie, and scores of other men who have left their mark upon the world. Voltaire's motto was "Toujours au travail" (always at work). Scott's maxim was "Never be doing nothing." Michael Angelo was a wonderful worker. He even slept in his clothes ready to spring to his work as soon as he awote. He kept a block of marble in his bedroom that he might get up in the night and work when he could not sleep. His favorite device was an old man in a go-cart, with an hour-glass upon it, bearing this inscription: "Ancora im. paro" (still I'm learning). Even after he was blind he would ask to be wheeled into the Belvidere, to examine the statues with his hands. Cobden used to say, "I'm working like a horse without a moment to spare." It was said that Händel, the musician, did the work of a dozen men. Nothing ever daunted him. He feared neither ridicule nor defeat. Lord Palmerston worked like a slave, even in his old age. Being asked when he considered a man in his prime, he replied, "Seventynine," that being his own age. Humboldt was one of the world's great workers. In summer he arose at four in the morning for thirty years. He used to say work was as much of a necessity as eating or sleeping. Sir Walter Scott was a phenomenal worker. He wrote the "Waverley Novels" at the rate of twelve volumes a year. He averaged a volume every two months during his whole working life. What an example is this to the young men of to-day, of the possibilities of an earnest life! Edmund Burke was one of the most prodi gious workers that ever lived.

Daniel Webster said, "I have worked for more than twelve hours a day for fifty years." Charles James Fox became a great orator, yet few people outside of his per sonal friends had any idea of how he struggled to per fect himself in "the art of all arts." He never let an opportunity for speaking or self-culture pass unim proved Henry Clay could have been found almost