OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE
To each man's life there comes a time supreme;
One day, one night, one morning, or one noon,
One freighted hour, one moment opportune,
One rift through which sublime fulfillments gleam,
One space when fate goes tiding with the stream,
One Once, in balance 'twixt Too Late, Too Soon,
And ready for the passing instant's boon
To tip in favor the uncertain beam.
Ah, happy he who, knowing how to wait,
Knows also how to watch and work and stand
On Life's broad deck alert, and at the prow
To seize the passing moment, big with fate,
From Opportunity's extended hand,
When the great clock of destiny strikes Now!
MARY A. TOWNSEND.
What is opportunity to a man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg,
which the waves of time wash away into non-entity.--GEORGE ELIOT.
The secret of success in life is for a man _to be ready for his
opportunity_ when it comes.--DISRAELI.
"There are no longer any good chances for young men," complained a
youthful law student to Daniel Webster. "There is always room at the
top," replied the great statesman and jurist.
No chance, no opportunities, in a land where thousands of poor boys
become rich men, where newsboys go to Congress, and where those born in
the lowest stations attain the highest positions? The world is all
gates, all opportunities to him who will use them. But, like Bunyan's
Pilgrim in the dungeon of Giant Despair's castle, who had the key of
deliverance all the time with him but had forgotten it, we fail to rely
wholly upon the ability to advance all that is good for us which has
been given to the weakest as well as the strongest. We depend too much
upon outside assistance.
"We look too high
For things close by."
A Baltimore lady lost a valuable diamond bracelet at a ball, and
supposed that it was stolen from the pocket of her cloak. Years
afterward she washed the steps of the Peabody Institute, pondering how
to get money to buy food. She cut up an old, worn-out, ragged cloak to
make a hood, when lo! in the lining of the cloak she discovered the
diamond bracelet. During all her poverty she was worth $3500, but did
not know it.
Many of us who think we are poor are rich in opportunities, if we could
only see them, in possibilities all about us, in faculties worth more
than diamond bracelets. In our large Eastern cities it has been found
that at least ninety-four out of every hundred found their first
fortune at home, or near at hand, and in meeting common every-day
wants. It is a sorry day for a young man who can not see any
opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do better somewhere else.
Some Brazilian shepherds organized a party to go to California to dig
gold, and took along a handful of translucent pebbles to play checkers
with on the voyage. After arriving in San Francisco, and after they
had thrown most of the pebbles away, they discovered that they were
diamonds. They hastened back to Brazil, only to find that the mines
from which the pebbles had been gathered had been taken up by other
prospectors and sold to the government.
The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold by the owner for
$42, to get money to pay his passage to other mines, where he thought
he could get rich. Professor Agassiz once told the Harvard students of
a farmer who owned a farm of hundreds of acres of unprofitable woods
and rocks, and concluded to sell out and get into a more profitable
business. He decided to go into the coal-oil business; he studied coal
measures and coal-oil deposits, and experimented for a long time. He
sold his farm for $200, and engaged in his new business two hundred
miles away. Only a short time after, the man who bought his farm
discovered upon it a great flood of coal-oil, which the farmer had
previously ignorantly tried to drain off.
Hundreds of years ago there lived near the shore of the river Indus a
Persian by the name of Ali Hafed. He lived in a cottage on the river
bank, from which he could get a grand view of the beautiful country
stretching away to the sea. He had a wife and children; an extensive
farm, fields of grain, gardens of flowers, orchards of fruit, and miles
of forest. He had plenty of money and everything that heart could
wish. He was contented and happy. One evening a priest of Buddha
visited him, and, sitting before the fire, explained to him how the
world was made, and how the first beams of sunlight condensed on the
earth's surface into diamonds.
The old priest told that a drop of sunlight the size of his thumb was
worth more than large mines of copper, silver, or gold; that with one
of them he could buy many farms like his; that with a handful he could
buy a province, and with a mine of diamonds he could purchase a
kingdom. Ali Hafed listened, and was no longer a rich man. He had
been touched with discontent, and with that all wealth vanishes. Early
the next morning he woke the priest who had been the cause of his
unhappiness, and anxiously asked him where he could find a mine of
diamonds. "What do you want of diamonds?" asked the astonished priest.
"I want to be rich and place my children on thrones." "All you have to
do is to go and search until you find them," said the priest. "But
where shall I go?" asked the poor farmer. "Go anywhere, north, south,
east, or west." "How shall I know when I have found the place?" "When
you find a river running over white sands between high mountain ranges,
in those white sands you will find diamonds," answered the priest.
The discontented man sold the farm for what he could get, left his
family with a neighbor, took the money he had at interest, and went to
search for the coveted treasure. Over the mountains of Arabia, through
Palestine and Egypt, he wandered for years, but found no diamonds.
When his money was all gone and starvation stared him in the face,
ashamed of his folly and of his rags, poor Ali Hafed threw himself into
the tide and was drowned. The man who bought his farm was a contented
man, who made the most of his surroundings, and did not believe in
going away from home to hunt for diamonds or success. While his camel
was drinking in the garden one day, he noticed a flash of light from
the white sands of the brook. He picked up a pebble, and pleased with
its brilliant hues took it into the house, put it on the shelf near the
fireplace, and forgot all about it.
The old priest of Buddha who had filled Ali Hafed with the fatal
discontent called one day upon the new owner of the farm. He had no
sooner entered the room than his eye caught that flash of light from
the stone. "Here's a diamond! here's a diamond!" he shouted in great
excitement. "Has Ali Hafed returned?" "No," said the farmer, "nor is
that a diamond. That is but a stone." They went into the garden and
stirred up the white sand with their fingers, and behold, other
diamonds more beautiful than the first gleamed out of it. So the
famous diamond beds of Golconda were discovered. Had Ali Hafed been
content to remain at home, and dug in his own garden, instead of going
abroad in search for wealth, he would have been one of the richest men
in the world, for the entire farm abounded in the richest of gems.
You have your own special place and work. Find it, fill it. Scarcely
a boy or girl will read these lines but has much better opportunity to
win success than Garfield, Wilson, Franklin, Lincoln, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Frances Willard, and thousands of others had. But to succeed
you must be prepared to seize and improve the opportunity when it
comes. Remember that four things come not back: the spoken word, the
sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
It is one of the paradoxes of civilization that the more opportunities
are utilized, the more new ones are thereby created. New openings are
as easy to find as ever to those who do their best; although it is not
so easy as formerly to obtain great distinction in the old lines,
because the standard has advanced so much, and competition has so
greatly increased. "The world is no longer clay," said Emerson, "but
rather iron in the hands of its workers, and men have got to hammer out
a place for themselves by steady and rugged blows."
Thousands of men have made fortunes out of trifles which others pass
by. As the bee gets honey from the same flower from which the spider
gets poison, so some men will get a fortune out of the commonest and
meanest things, as scraps of leather, cotton waste, slag, iron filings,
from which others get only poverty and failure. There is scarcely a
thing which contributes to the welfare and comfort of humanity,
scarcely an article of household furniture, a kitchen utensil, an
article of clothing or of food, that is not capable of an improvement
in which there may be a fortune.
Opportunities? They are all around us. Forces of nature plead to be
used in the service of man, as lightning for ages tried to attract his
attention to the great force of electricity, which would do his
drudgery and leave him to develop the God-given powers within him.
There is power lying latent everywhere waiting for the observant eye to
discover it.
First find out what the world needs and then supply the want. An
invention to make smoke go the wrong way in a chimney might be a very
ingenious thing, but it would be of no use to humanity. The patent
office at Washington is full of wonderful devices of ingenious
mechanism, but not one in hundreds is of use to the inventor or to the
world. And yet how many families have been impoverished, and have
struggled for years amid want and woe, while the father has been
working on useless inventions. A. T. Stewart, as a boy, lost
eighty-seven cents, when his capital was one dollar and a half, in
buying buttons and thread which shoppers did not call for. After that
he made it a rule never to buy anything which the public did not want,
and so prospered.
An observing man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who could
not afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a
metallic lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather." He was
then so poor that he had to borrow a sickle to cut grass in front of
his hired tenement. He became a very rich man.
An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
improvement on shears for cutting hair, invented clippers, and became
rich. A Maine man was called in from the hayfield to wash clothes for
his invalid wife. He had never realized what it was to wash before.
Finding the method slow and laborious, he invented the washing machine,
and made a fortune. A man who was suffering terribly with toothache
felt sure there must be some way of filling teeth which would prevent
their aching and he invented the method of gold filling for teeth.
The great things of the world have not been done by men of large means.
Ericsson began the construction of the screw propellers in a bathroom.
The cotton-gin was first manufactured in a log cabin. John Harrison,
the great inventor of the marine chronometer, began his career in the
loft of an old barn. Parts of the first steamboat ever run in America
were set up in the vestry of a church in Philadelphia by Fitch.
McCormick began to make his famous reaper in a grist-mill. The first
model dry-dock was made in an attic. Clark, the founder of Clark
University of Worcester, Mass., began his great fortune by making toy
wagons in a horse shed. Farquhar made umbrellas in his sitting-room,
with his daughter's help, until he sold enough to hire a loft. Edison
began his experiments in a baggage car on the Grand Trunk Railroad when
a newsboy.
Michael Angelo found a piece of discarded Carrara marble among waste
rubbish beside a street in Florence, which some unskilful workman had
cut, hacked, spoiled, and thrown away. No doubt many artists had
noticed the fine quality of the marble, and regretted that it should
have been spoiled. But Michael Angelo still saw an angel in the ruin,
and with his chisel and mallet he called out from it one of the finest
pieces of statuary in Italy, the young David.
Patrick Henry was called a lazy boy, a good-for-nothing farmer, and he
failed as a merchant. He was always dreaming of some far-off
greatness, and never thought he could be a hero among the corn and
tobacco and saddlebags of Virginia. He studied law for six weeks; when
he put out his shingle. People thought he would fail, but in his first
case he showed that he had a wonderful power of oratory. It then first
dawned upon him that he could be a hero in Virginia. From the time the
Stamp Act was passed and Henry was elected to the Virginia House of
Burgesses, and he had introduced his famous resolution against the
unjust taxation of the American colonies, he rose steadily until he
became one of the brilliant orators of America. In one of his first
speeches upon this resolution he uttered these words, which were
prophetic of his power and courage: "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the
First his Cromwell, and George the Third--may profit by their example.
If this be treason, make the most of it."
The great natural philosopher, Faraday, who was the son of a
blacksmith, wrote, when a young man, to Humphry Davy, asking for
employment at the Royal Institution. Davy consulted a friend on the
matter. "Here is a letter from a young man named Faraday; he has been
attending my lectures, and wants me to give him employment at the Royal
Institution--what can I do?" "Do? put him to washing bottles; if he is
good for anything he will do it directly; if he refuses he is good for
nothing." But the boy who could experiment in the attic of an
apothecary shop with an old pan and glass vials during every moment he
could snatch from his work saw an opportunity in washing bottles, which
led to a professorship at the Royal Academy at Woolwich. Tyndall said
of this boy with no chance, "He is the greatest experimental
philosopher the world has ever seen." He became the wonder of his age
in science.
There is a legend of an artist who long sought for a piece of
sandalwood, out of which to carve a Madonna. He was about to give up
in despair, leaving the vision of his life unrealized, when in a dream
he was bidden to carve his Madonna from a block of oak wood which was
destined for the fire. He obeyed, and produced a masterpiece from a
log of common firewood. Many of us lose great opportunities in life by
waiting to find sandalwood for our carvings, when they really lie
hidden in the common logs that we burn. One man goes through life
without seeing chances for doing anything great, while another close
beside him snatches from the same circumstances and privileges
opportunities for achieving grand results.
Opportunities? They are everywhere. "America is another name for
opportunities. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine
Providence in behalf of the human race." Never before were there such
grand openings, such chances, such opportunities. Especially is this
true for girls and young women. A new era is dawning for them.
Hundreds of occupations and professions, which were closed to them only
a few years ago, are now inviting them to enter.
We can not all of us perhaps make great discoveries like Newton,
Faraday, Edison, and Thompson, or paint immortal pictures like an
Angelo or a Raphael. But we can all of us make our lives sublime, by
_seizing common occasions and making them great_. What chance had the
young girl, Grace Darling, to distinguish herself, living on those
barren lighthouse rocks alone with her aged parents? But while her
brothers and sisters, who moved to the cities to win wealth and fame,
are not known to the world, she became more famous than a princess.
This poor girl did not need to go to London to see the nobility; they
came to the lighthouse to see her. Right at home she had won fame
which the regal heirs might envy, and a name which will never perish
from the earth. She did not wander away into dreamy distance for fame
and fortune, but did her best where duty had placed her.
If you want to get rich, study yourself and your own wants. You will
find that millions have the same wants. The safest business is always
connected with man's prime necessities. He must have clothing and
dwelling; he must eat. He wants comforts, facilities of all kinds for
pleasure, education, and culture. Any man who can supply a great want
of humanity, improve any methods which men use, supply any demand of
comfort, or contribute in any way to their well-being, can make a
fortune.
"The golden opportunity
Is never offered twice; seize then the hour
When Fortune smiles and Duty points the way."
Why thus longing, thus forever sighing,
For the far-off, unattained and dim,
While the beautiful, all around thee lying
Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?
HARRIET WINSLOW.