Audubon after years of forest life had two hundred of his priceless drawings destroyed by mice.

“A poignant flame,” he relates, “pierced my brain like an arrow of fire, and for several weeks I was prostrated with fever.  At length physical and moral strength awoke within me.  Again I took my gun, my game-bag, my portfolio, and my pencils, and plunged once more into the depths of the forests.”

All are familiar with the misfortune of Carlyle while writing his “History of the French Revolution.”  After the first volume was ready for the press, he loaned the manuscript to a neighbor, who left it lying on the floor, and the servant girl took it to kindle the fire.  It was a bitter disappointment, but Carlyle was not the man to give up.  After many months of poring Over hundreds of volumes of authorities and scores of manuscripts, he reproduced that which had burned in a few minutes.

PROCEED, AND LIGHT WILL DAWN.

The slightest acquaintance with literary history would bring to light a multitude of heroes of poverty or misfortune, of men and women perplexed and disheartened, who have yet aroused themselves to new effort at every new obstacle.

It is related by Arago that he found under the cover of a text book he was binding a short note from D’Alembert to a student: 

“Go on, sir, go on.  The difficulties you meet with will resolve themselves as you advance.  Proceed; and light will dawn, and shine with increasing clearness on your path.”

“That maxim,” said Arago, “was my greatest master in mathematics.”

Had Balzac been easily discouraged he would have hesitated at the words of warning given by his father: 

“Do you know that in literature a man must be either a king or a beggar?”

“Very well,” was the reply, “I will be a king.”

His parents left him to his fate in a garret.  For ten years he fought terrible battles with hardship and poverty, but won a great victory at last.  He won it after producing forty novels that did not win.

Zola’s early manhood witnessed a bitter struggle against poverty and deprivation.  Until twenty he was a spoiled child; but, on his father’s death, he and his mother began the battle of life in Paris.  Of his dark time, Zola himself says: 

“Often I went hungry for so long, that it seemed as if I must die.  I scarcely tasted meat from one month’s end to another, and for two days I lived on three apples.  Fire, even on the coldest nights, was an undreamed-of luxury; and I was the happiest man in Paris when I could get a candle, by the light of which I might study at night.”

Samuel Johnson’s bare feet at Oxford showed through the holes in his shoes, yet he threw out at his window the new pair that some one left at his door.  He lived for a time in London on nine cents a day.  For thirteen years he had a hard struggle with want.  John Locke once lived on bread and water in a Dutch garret, and Heyne slept many a night on a barn floor with only a book for his pillow.  It was to poverty as a thorn urging the breast of Harriet Martineau that we owe her writings.