Look at this easy-going, pleasure-loving youth who takes up the mallet and smites the chisel with careless, thoughtless blows.  His mind is filled with images of low, sensual pleasures; the passing enjoyment of the hour is everything to him; his work, the future, nothing.  He carries in his heart, perhaps, the bestial motto of the glutton, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die;” or the flippant maxim of the gay worldling, “A short life and a merry one; the foam of the chalice for me;” forgetting that beneath the foam are the bitter dregs, which, be he ever so unwilling, he must swallow, not to-day, nor yet to-morrow,—­perhaps not this year nor next; but sometime, as surely as the reaping follows the sowing, will the bitter draught follow the foaming glass of unlawful pleasure.

As the years go by, and youth merges into manhood, the sculptor’s hand becomes more unsteady.  One false blow follows another in rapid succession.  The formless marble takes on distorted outlines.  Its whiteness has long since become spotted.  The sculptor, with blurred vision and shattered nerves, still strikes with aimless hand, carving deep gashes, adding a crooked line here, another there, soiling and marring until no trace of the virgin purity of the block of marble which was given him remains.  It has become so grimy, so demoniacally fantastic in its outlines, that the beholder turns from it with a shudder.

Not far off we see another youth at work on a block of marble, similar in every detail to the first.  The tools with which he plies his labor differ in no wise from those of the worker we have been following.

The glory of the morning shines upon the marble.  Glowing with enthusiasm, the light of a high purpose illuminating his face, the sculptor, with steady hand and eye, begins to work out his ideal.  The vision that flits before him is so beautiful that he almost fears the cunning of his hand will be unequal to fashioning it from the rigid mass before him.  Patiently he measures each blow of the mallet.  With infinite care he chisels each line and curve.  Every stroke is true.

Months stretch into years, and still we find the sculptor at work.  Time has given greater precision to his touch, and the skill of the youth, strengthened by noble aspirations and right effort, has become positive genius in the man.  If he has not attained the ideal that haunted him, he has created a form so beautiful in its clear-cut outlines, so imposing in the majesty of its purity and strength, that the beholder involuntarily bows before it.

The marble waiteth.  What will you do with it?  The Project Gutenberg Etext of Stories from Life by Marden vice Harden ******This file should be named sflif10.txt or sflif10.zip******

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