the other had to be raised in order that he might see those who visited him.  Let those who have ever felt the aching of a single tooth imagine what it must have been to suffer the same kind of pain over the whole body.  Surely this poor tortured wretch might have been pardoned had he esteemed his life a failure!  His spirit never flagged, and he wrote the brightest, lightest mockeries that ever were framed by the wit of man; his poems will be the delight of Europe for years to come, and his memory can no more perish than that of Shakspere.

Enough of examples; the main fact is that to men and women who refuse to accept failure all life is open, and there is something to hope for even up to the verge of the grave.  When the sullen storm-cloud of misfortune lowers and life seems dim and dreary, that is the hour to summon up courage, and to look persistently beyond the bounds of the mournful present.  Why should we uplift our voices in pettish questioning?  The blows that cut most cruelly are meant for our better discipline, and, if we steel every nerve against the onset of despair, the battle is half won even before we put forth a conscious effort.  There never yet was a misfortune or an array of misfortunes, there never was an entanglement wound by malign chance from which a man could not escape by dint of his own unaided energy.  By all means let us pity those who are sore beset amid the keen sorrows that haunt the world, look with tenderness on their pain, soothe them in their perplexities; but, before all things, incite them to struggle against the numbing influence of despondency.  The early failures are the raw material of the finest successes; and the general who loses a battle, the mechanic who fails to find work, the writer who pines for the approach of tardy fame, the forsaken lover who looks out on a dark universe, and the servant who meets only censure and coldness, despite her attempts to fulfil her duty, all come under the same law.  If they consent to drift away into the limbo of failures, they have only to resign themselves, and their existence will soon end in futility and disaster; but, if they refuse to cringe under the lash of circumstances, if they toil on as though a bright goal were immediately before them, the result is almost assured; and, even if they do succumb, they have the blessed knowledge that they have failed gallantly.  Half the misfortunes which crush the children of men into insignificance are more or less magnified by imagination, and the swollen bulk of trouble dwindles before an effort of the human will.  Read over the dismal record of a year’s suicides, and you will find that in nine cases out of ten the causes which lead unhappy men and women to quench their own light of life are absolutely trivial to the sane and steadfast soul.  Let those who are heavy of heart when ill-fortune seems to have mastered them remember that our Master is before all things just.  He lays no burden that ought not to be borne on any one