AUTHORS.
SHAKSPEARE.—SPENSER.—-JOHNSON.—GIFFORD.—GIBBON.
Creative genius is popularly held to be dependent on faculties
widely diverse from those required by the mere man of learning. The
linguist is usually regarded as a traveller on a beaten track; the
poet, as a discoverer of new regions. Success for the man of learning
is considered to depend on diligence in the exercise of the memory
and judgment; while obedience to impulse seems to be the mental
law popularly allotted to poets. Let the young reader inquire for
himself, whether there is not something of fallacy in this popular
notion.
SHAKSPEARE,
The most highly endowed of human intelligences, was under as great
necessity of learning the vocabulary of the English tongue as the
very commonest mind. He, like all other men, however inferior to
him in understanding or imagination, was born without any innate
knowledge of things, or their natures, words, or the rules for
fashioning them in order, or combining them with grace and harmony,
eloquence and strength. Every author of the first class was in the
same predicament mentally at birth; they had everything to learn,
and the perfection of their learning depended on their own effort.
It may be equally affirmed, then, of the highest poet and the
greatest linguist, of Shakspeare and Sir William Jones, that neither
had any “royal road” for gaining his peculiar eminence.
[Illustration: SHAKSPEARE]
The little we know of the personal history of Shakspeare renders it
necessary for us to attribute a very ample measure of his unrivalled
excellence to that quality of the mind which we are insisting upon
as requisite for the performance of great and exalted labours. If it
be true that schoolmasters taught him little, how indefatigable must
have been that perseverance which enabled him, not simply to equal,
but so immeasurably to transcend his more learned contemporaries and
fellow-workers, in the wealth of his language, and in the beauty and
fitness of its application! If his helps were few, so much the more
astonishing is the energy and continuity of effort which issued in
securing for him who exerted it the highest name in the world’s
literature. Nor can minds of primal order be satisfied with a passing
ovation that may be forgotten; they thirst to render their triumphs
monumental. Our grand dramatist piled effort upon effort, until he
left to the world the priceless legacy of his thirty-seven plays.
His mind had none of the sickly quality which views a settled form
of composition as irksome, and indulges its unhealthy fantasies in
irregular and useless essays. He wrought out his magnificent and
self-appointed task to the end; he made his own monument worthy of
himself.
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF SHAKSPEARE.]
SPENSER,
[Illustration: SPENSER]
Was not less an exemplar of diligence than of skill in the
architecture of verse. The mere task-work of constructing three
thousand eight hundred and fifty-four stanzas, comprising forty-four
thousand six hundred and sixty-eight lines, would have wearied
out the industry of any mind whose powers were not indefatigable.
He died, too, before his magnificent design was complete, or the
elaborate monument of his fame might have been still more colossal.
Superiority to mental indolence, so manifest in the lives of
Shakspeare and Spenser, is equally noticeable in the cases of Chaucer
and Milton, of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, of Dryden and
Pope, of Byron and Wordsworth, our other great poets; and, indeed, in
the histories of the great poets of all nations. When the quantity
of their composition is considered, and it is remembered how much
thought must have been expended in the bringing together of choice
materials, how much care in the polishing and adorning of each part,
and of the whole, of their seemly fabrics, the degree of perseverance
exercised in the erection of so many immortal superstructures of the
mind is presented to reflection with commanding self-evidence. But
let us track, more circumstantially, the life-path, so proverbial for
vicissitude, of some of the children of genius, that we may see how
the energy of true men is neither quelled by difficulty nor enervated
by success.
JOHNSON,
Afterwards so famous as the great arbiter of literary criticism, is
found leaving college without a degree, and, from sheer poverty, at
the age of twenty-two. The sale of his deceased father’s effects,
a few months after, affords him but twenty pounds, and he is
constrained to become an usher in a grammar school in Leicestershire.
In the next year he performs a translation of “Lobo’s Voyage to
Abyssinia” for a Birmingham bookseller, returns to Lichfield, his
birth-place, and publishes proposals for printing, by subscription,
the Latin poems of Politian, the life of that author, and a history
of Latin poetry from the era of Petrarch to the time of Politian. His
project failed to attract patrons, and he next offered his services
to Cave, the original projector of the “Gentleman’s Magazine.” Cave
accepted his offer, but on conditions which compelled Johnson to make
application elsewhere for earning the means of living. He again
offered to become assistant to the master of a grammar school; but,
in spite of the great learning he had even then acquired, he was
rejected, from the fear that his peculiar nervous and involuntary
gestures would render him an object of ridicule with his pupils.
Such was one of the disabilities of constitution under which this
humbly-born and strong-minded man laboured through life.
[Illustration: Johnson]
Won, not by his ungainly person, but by the high qualities of his
mind, a widow, with a little fortune of eight hundred pounds, yielded
him her hand, in this season of his poverty; and he immediately
opened a classical school in his native town. The celebrated
Garrick, then about eighteen years old, became his pupil. His scheme,
however, did not succeed; his newly acquired property was exhausted;
and he and Garrick, then eight years his junior, set out together
for London, with the resolve to seek their fortunes in the larger
world. Garrick in a short time was acknowledged as the first genius
on the stage, and made his way to wealth almost without difficulty.
A longer and more toilful period of trial fell to the lot of the
scholar and author. He first offered to the booksellers a manuscript
tragedy, supposed to be his “Irene,” but could find no one willing
to accept it. Cave gave him an engagement to translate the “History
of the Council of Trent.” He received forty-nine pounds for part of
the translation, but it was never completed for lack of sale. His
pecuniary condition was so low, soon after this, that he and Savage,
having walked, conversing, round Grosvenor Square, till four in
the morning, and beginning to feel the want of refreshment, could
not muster between them more than fourpence-halfpenny! He received
ten guineas for his celebrated poem of “London;” but though Pope
said, “The author, whoever he was, could not be long concealed,”
no further advantage was derived by Johnson from its publication.
Hearing of a vacancy in the mastership of another grammar school in
Leicestershire, he, once more, proceeds thither as a candidate. The
consequences of the poverty which had prevented him from remaining at
the university till he could take a degree were now grievously felt.
The statutes of the place required that the person chosen should be
a Master of Arts. Some interest was made to obtain him that degree
from the Dublin University; but it failed, and he was again thrown
back on London.
In spite of his melancholic constitution, these repeated
disappointments, so far from filling him with despair, seem only
to have quickened his invention, and strengthened his resolution
to continue the struggle for fame. He formed numerous projects
on his return to the metropolis; but none succeeded except his
contributions to the “Gentleman’s Magazine;” these were, chiefly, the
“Parliamentary Debates,” which the world read with the belief that
they were thus becoming acquainted with the eloquence of Chatham,
Walpole, and their compeers, and little dreaming that those speeches
were “written in a garret in Exeter Street,” by a poverty-stricken
author. The talent displayed in this anonymous labour did not serve,
as yet, to free him from difficulties. He next undertook to collect
and arrange the tracts forming the miscellany, entitled “Harleian.”
Osborne, the bookseller, was his employer in this work; and, having
purchased Lord Oxford’s library, the bookseller also employed Johnson
to form a catalogue. To relieve his drudgery, Johnson occasionally
paused to peruse the book that came to hand; Osborne complained of
this; a dispute arose; and the bookseller, with great roughness,
gave the author the lie. The incident so characteristic of Johnson,
and so often related, now took place—Johnson seized a folio, and
knocked the bookseller down. The act was far from justifiable; but
his indignation under the offence must have been great, as his
rigid adherence to speaking the truth was so observable, that one of
his most intimate friends declared “he always talked as if he were
speaking on oath.”
He escaped, at length, from some degree of the humiliation which
attaches to poverty. He projected his great work—the English
Dictionary; several of the wealthiest booksellers entered into
the scheme, and Johnson now left lodging in the courts and alleys
about the Strand, and took a house in Gough Square, Fleet Street.
This did not occur till he was eight-and-thirty; so great a portion
of life had he passed in almost perpetual contest with pecuniary
difficulties; nor was he entirely freed from them for some years
to come. During the years spent in the exhausting labour of his
Dictionary, the fifteen hundred guineas he received for the
copyright were consumed on amanuenses, and the provision necessary
for himself and his wife. The “Rambler” was written during these
years in which his Dictionary was in course of publication, and the
circumstances of its composition are most note-worthy among the
“Triumphs of Perseverance.” With the exception of five numbers,
every essay was written by Johnson himself; and it was regularly
issued every Tuesday and Friday, for two years. The perseverance
which enabled him so punctually to execute a stated task, even while
continuously labouring in the greater work in which he was engaged,
is remarkable: but the young reader’s thought ought to be more deeply
fixed on the consideration that a life of unremitting devotion to
study—unconquered by difficulty, and straitness of circumstances—had
rendered him able easily to pour forth the treasures of a full
mind. Although apparently the product of great care, and stored with
the richest moral reflections, these essays were usually written in
haste, frequently while the printer’s boy was waiting, and not even
read over before given to him. This was not recklessness in Johnson,
though it would have been folly in one whose mind was not most
opulently stored with matured thought, and who had not attained such
a habit of modulating sentences, as to render it almost mechanical.
Such attainments can only be reached by the most determined disciple
of perseverance. “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself
doggedly to it,” was Johnson’s own saying; but he could not have
verified it, unless his mind, by assiduous application, had been
filled with the materials of writing. He was, likewise, held in high
celebrity as the best converser of his age; but he acknowledged that
he had attained his extraordinary accuracy and flow of language by
having early laid it down as a fixed rule to arrange his thoughts
before expressing them, and never to suffer a careless or unmeaning
expression to escape from him.
The profits of a second periodical, “The Idler,” and the
subscriptions for his edition of Shakspeare, were the means by which
he supported himself for the four or five years immediately preceding
the age of fifty. His wife had already died, and his aged mother
being near her dissolution, in order to reach Lichfield, and pay her
the last offices of filial piety, he devoted one fortnight to the
composition of his beautiful and immortal tale of “Rasselas,” for
which he received one hundred pounds. He did not arrive in time to
close her eyes, but saw her decently interred, and then hastened back
to London, to go, once more, into lodgings and retrench expenses.
The next three years of his life appear to have been passed in even
more than his early poverty; but the end of his difficulties was
approaching.
The last twenty-two years of his existence—from the age of
fifty-three to seventy-five—were spent in the receipt of a royal
pension of three hundred pounds per annum; in the society of persons
of fortune, who considered themselves honoured by the company of
the once poverty-stricken and unknown scholar; in the companionship
of Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and
Joseph Warton, and others whose names are durably written on the roll
of genius, and in the receipt of the highest honours of learning—for
the Universities, both of Dublin and Oxford, conferred upon him the
degree of Doctor of Laws, and the Oxford University had previously
sent him the degree of Master of Arts. Regarded as the great umpire
of literary taste, receiving deference and respect wherever he
went, and no longer driven to his pen by necessity, this honoured
exemplar of perseverance did not pass through his remaining course
in unproductive indolence. In addition to less important works, his
“Lives of the Poets” was produced in this closing period of his life,
and is well known as the most valuable and useful of his labours,
with the exception of his great Dictionary.
WILLIAM GIFFORD,
[Illustration: WILLIAM GIFFORD]
In the early circumstances of his life, is a still more striking
exemplar of the virtue of perseverance. He was left an orphan at
thirteen years of age, was sent to sea for a twelvemonth, and was
then taken home by his godfather, who had seized upon whatever his
mother had left, as a means of repaying himself for money lent to
her, and was now constrained to pay some attention to the boy, by
the keen remonstrances of his neighbours. He was sent to school, and
made such rapid progress in arithmetic that, in a few months, he was
at the head of the school, and frequently assisted his master. The
receipt of a trifle for these services raised in him the thought of
one day becoming a schoolmaster, in the room of a teacher in the
town of Ashburton, who was growing old and infirm. He mentioned his
scheme to his godfather, who treated it with contempt, and forthwith
apprenticed him to a shoemaker. His new master subjected him to the
greatest degradation, made him the common drudge of his household,
and took from him the means of pursuing his favourite study of
arithmetic.
“I could not guess the motives for this at first,” he says—for his
narrative is too remarkable at this period of his struggles, to be
told in any other than his own language—“but at length discovered
that my master destined his youngest son for the situation to which I
aspired. I possessed, at this time, but one book in the world, it was
a treatise on algebra, given to me by a young woman, who had found
it in a lodging-house. I considered it as a treasure, but it was a
treasure locked up, for it supposed the reader to be well acquainted
with simple equations, and I knew nothing of the matter. My master’s
son had purchased ‘Fenning’s Introduction;’ this was precisely what
I wanted; but he carefully concealed it from me, and I was indebted
to chance alone for stumbling upon his hiding-place. I sat up for
the greatest part of several nights, successively; and, before he
suspected that his treatise was discovered, had completely mastered
it. I could now enter upon my own, and that carried me pretty far
into the science. This was not done without difficulty. I had not a
farthing on earth, nor a friend to give me one; pen, ink, and paper,
therefore, were, for the most part, as completely out of my reach as
a crown and sceptre. There was, indeed, a resource, but the utmost
caution and secrecy were necessary in applying to it. I beat out
pieces of leather as smooth as possible, and wrought my problems on
them with a blunted awl; for the rest, my memory was tenacious, and I
could multiply and divide by it to a great extent.”
He essayed the composition of rhyme, and the rehearsal of his verses
secured him a few pence from his acquaintances. He now furnished
himself with pens, ink, and paper, and even bought some books of
geometry and of the higher branches of algebra; but was obliged to
conceal them, and to pursue his studies by continued caution. Some of
his verses, however, were shown to his master, and were understood
to contain satirical reflections upon his oppressor. His books and
papers were seized upon, by way of punishment; and he was reduced to
the deepest despair. “I look back,” he says, in his own admirable
narrative, “on that part of my life which immediately followed this
event with little satisfaction: it was a period of gloom, and savage
unsociability: by degrees I sunk into a kind of corporeal torpor;
or, if roused into activity by the spirit of youth, wasted the
exertion in splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alienated the few
acquaintances compassion had left me.”
The heart revolts at the brutal injustice which drove Gifford’s young
nature thus to harden itself into gloomy endurance of his lot, by
“savage unsociability;” but a mind like his could not take that stamp
for life. His disposition grew again buoyant, and his aspirations
began to rekindle, as the term of his bondage grew shorter. Had he
found no deliverance till it had legally expired, it may be safely
affirmed that he would then have forced his way into eminence by
self-assisted efforts; but an accidental circumstance emancipated him
a year before the legal expiry of his apprenticeship. Mr. Cookesley,
a philanthropic surgeon, having learnt from Gifford himself the facts
of his hard history, through mere curiosity awakened by hearing some
of his rhymes repeated, started ‘A subscription for purchasing the
remainder of the time of William Gifford, and for enabling him to
improve himself in writing and English grammar.’ Enough was collected
to satisfy his master’s demand, he was placed at school with a
clergyman, made his way into the classics, displayed such diligence
that more money was raised to continue him in his promising course;
and in two years and two months from the day of his liberation, he
was considered by his instructor to be fit for the University, and
was sent to Exeter College, Oxford.
Perseverance! what can it not effect? It enabled Gifford to surmount
difficulties arising from the most vulgar and brutifying influences,
and to make his way triumphantly into an intellectual region of
delectable enjoyment. From a boy neglected and degraded—from a youth
baffled and thwarted in his aims at a higher state of existence
than that of merely living to labour in order to eat, drink, and
be clothed—from one fastening his desire upon knowledge, only to
be scorned and mocked, and treated as a criminal where he was
meriting applause—from a poor pitiable straggler longing for mental
breathing-room, amid the coarse conversation he would undoubtedly
hear from his master, and those who were his associates, and sinking
for some period into sullen despair with his hardship, that like
an untoward sky seemed to promise no break of relieving light—he
becomes a glad and easier student; is enabled not merely ‘to improve
himself in writing and English grammar,’ but, in six-and-twenty
months, becomes a converser, in their own noble language, with the
great spirits of Rome and Greece: and enters the most venerable arena
of learning in Britain, to become a rival in elegant scholarship
with the young heirs to coronets and titles, and to England’s
widest wealth and influence. What a change did those ancient halls
of architectural grandeur, with all their associations of great
intellectual names, present for the young and ardent toiler who, but
six-and-twenty months before, had bent over the _last_ from morning
to night, shut out from all that could cheer or elevate the mind, and
surrounded with nought but that which tended to disgust and degrade
it!
Nor did the career of the young disciple of perseverance, when
arrived at his new and loftier stage of struggle, discredit the
foresight of those who had assisted him. His first benefactor died
before Gifford took his degree, but he was enabled by the generosity
of Lord Grosvenor to pursue his studies at the University to a
successful issue. After some absence on the continent, as travelling
tutor to the nobleman just mentioned, he entered on his course as an
author, and gained some distinction; but won his chief celebrity,
as well as most substantial rewards, while Editor of the “Quarterly
Review”—an office he held from the commencement of that periodical,
1809, till his death, on the last day of 1826, when he had reached
the age of seventy-one. In the performance of this critical service
he had a salary of one thousand a year; and it is a noble conclusion
to the history of this successful scholar of Perseverance, that
true-hearted gratitude led him to bequeath the bulk of his fortune to
Mr. Cookesley, the son of his early benefactor.
The superiority of genius to difficulties, and the certainty with
which it achieves high triumphs through longer or shorter paths
of vicissitude, might be shown from the memoirs of Erasmus, and
Mendelsohn, and Goldsmith, and Holcroft, and Kirke White, and others,
almost a countless host. Early poverty may be said, however, to
stimulate the children of Genius to exertion; and its influence
may be judged to weaken the merit of their perseverance, since
their triumphs may be dated from deep desire to escape from its
disadvantages. That such a feeling has been participated by many,
or all, of the illustrious climbers after literary distinction, it
may not be denied; though the world usually attributes more to its
workings in the minds of men of genius than the interior truth, if
known, would warrant: the strong necessity to create—the restless
power to embody their thinkings—these deep-seated springs of exertion
in intellectual men, if understood, would afford a truer solution
of their motives for beginning, and the determination to excel for
continuing their course, than any mere sordid impulses with which
they are often charged. Let us turn to a celebrated name, around
which no irksome influences of poverty gathered, either at the
outset of his life, or in his progress to literary distinction.
His systematic direction of the knowledge acquired by inquiries
as profound as they were diversified, and his application of the
experience of life, alike to the same great end, afford an admirable
spectacle of the noblest perseverance, and of memorable victory over
the seductions of ease and competence.
GIBBON,
[Illustration: Gibbon]
The author of the unrivalled “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,”
was born to considerable fortune. He left the University at eighteen,
after great loss of time, as he tells us in his instructive
autobiography, and with what was worse, habits of expense and
dissipation. His father being under distressing anxiety on account
of his son’s irregularities, and, afterwards, from what he deemed
of greater moment, young Gibbon’s sudden avowal of conversion to
the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church, placed him abroad, under
the strict care of a Protestant minister. Gibbon began to awake
to reflection; and, without prescription from his new guardian,
voluntarily entered on severe study. He diligently translated the
best Roman writers, turned them into French, and then again into
Latin, comparing Cicero and Livy, and Seneca and Horace, with the
best orators and historians, philosophers and poets, of the moderns.
He next advanced to the Greek, and pursued a similar course with
the treasures of that noble literature. He afterwards commenced
an inquiry into the Law of Nations, and sedulously perused the
treatises of Grotius, Puffendorf, Locke, Bayle, and Montesquieu, the
acknowledged authorities on that great subject. He mentions three
books which absorbed more than the usual interest he felt in whatever
he read: “Pascal’s Provincial Letters,” the “Abbe de la Bléterie’s
Life of the Emperor Julian,” and “Giannone’s Civil History of
Naples:” the character of these works shadows forth the grand design
which was gradually forming in his mind.
Yet without method, without taking care to store up this various
knowledge in such a mode that it might not be mere lumber in the
memory, he speedily discerned that even years spent in industrious
reading would be, comparatively, of little worth. He, therefore,
began to digest his various reading in a common-place book, according
to the method recommended by Locke. The eager and enthusiastic
student—for such he had now become—by this systematic arrangement
of his knowledge under heads, perceived his wants more distinctly,
and entered into correspondence for the solution of historic
difficulties, with some of the most illustrious scholars of his time,
among whom were Professors Crevier of Paris, Breittinger of Zurich,
and Matth. Gesner of Göttingen. From each of these learned men he
received such flattering notice of the acuteness of his inquiries, as
proved how well he had employed the time and means at his command.
His first work, written in French, the “Essay on the Study of
Literature,” was produced at three-and-twenty, after his laborious
reading of the best English and French, as well as Latin and Greek
authors.
A transition was now made by him, from retired leisure to active
life. His father was made major of the Hampshire Militia, himself
captain of grenadiers, and the regiment was called out on duty. He
had to devote two years and a half to this employ, and expresses
considerable discontent with his “wandering life of military
servitude;” but thus judiciously tempers his observations: “In every
state there exists, however, a balance of good and evil. The habits
of a sedentary life were usefully broken by the duties of an active
profession.”... “After my foreign education, with my reserved temper,
I should long have continued a stranger to my native country, had I
not been shaken in this various scene of new faces and new friends;
had not experience forced me to feel the characters of our leading
men, the state of parties, the forms of office, and the operation of
our civil and military system. In this peaceful service I imbibed the
rudiments and the language and science of tactics, which opened a
new field of study and observation.... The discipline and evolutions
of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and
the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers has not been
useless to the historian of the Roman empire.”
Let the young reader observe how, even when a purpose is not as yet
distinctly formed, the leading events of life, as well as study, may
be made by the regal mind to bend and contribute to the realising of
one. Our great paramount duty is to husband time well, to let not an
hour glide uselessly, to go on extending our range of knowledge, and
resolving to act our part well, even while we are in uncertainty as
to what our part may be. The seed well sown, the germs well watered,
and a useful harvest must result, though neither we, nor any who look
on, for a while, may be able to prophesy of the quality or abundance
of the grain, seeing it is but yet in its growth. “From my early
youth I aspired to the character of an historian,” says Gibbon;
“while I served in the militia, before and after the publication of
my ‘Essay,’ this idea ripened in my mind.”
Yet, he was for a time undecided as to a subject: the Expedition
of Charles the Eighth of France into Italy; the Crusade of Cœur
de Lion; the Barons’ Wars against John and Henry the Third; the
History of Edward the Black Prince; Lives and comparisons of Henry
the Fifth and the Emperor Titus; the Life of Sir Philip Sidney,
of the Marquis of Montrose, of Raleigh—and other subjects of high
interest, but each and all inferior to the one he at length
undertook, and for which his studies had all along peculiarly fitted
him, successively attracted his attention. Amidst the colossal ruins
of the amphitheatre of Titus, the idea at length was formed in his
mind of tracing the vicissitudes of Rome; and this idea swelled
until his conception extended to such a history as should depicture
the thousand years of change which fill up the period between the
reign of the Antonines and the conquest of Constantinople by the
Turks. Years of laborious study and research were necessary to
accomplish this gigantic labour; but it was perfected, and remains
the grandest historic monument ever raised by an Englishman. The
recent investigations of Guizot have more fully confirmed the fact of
the minute and careful inquiries of Gibbon, in bringing together the
vast and multifarious materials necessary for the accurate completion
of his design. His great work is, emphatically, for strictness of
statement, combined with such comprehensiveness of subjects, for
depth and clearness of disquisition, and for splendour of style, one
of the most magnificent “Triumphs of Perseverance.”
And is the roll of these triumphs complete? Have the labours of
the past pretermitted the possibility of equal victories in the
future? Never, while the human mind exists, can the catalogue of its
successes be deemed to have found a limit or an end. Immense fields
of history remain yet untrodden and uncultivated; innumerable facts
throughout the ages which are gone remain to be collected by industry
and arranged by judgment; the ever-varying phases of human affairs
offer perpetual material for new chronicle: let none who meditates to
devote his youth to historical inquiry, with the meritorious resolve
to distinguish his manhood by some useful monument of solid thought,
imagine that his ground has been narrowed, but rather understand that
it has been cleared and enlarged by the noble workmen who have gone
before.
Neither let the young and gifted, in whom the kindlings of creative
genius are felt, listen to the dull voices who say, “The last epic
has been written—no more great dramas shall be produced—the lyrics of
the past will never be equalled!” If such vaticinations were true, it
would show that the human mind was dwarfed. Shakspere did not believe
that, or he would not have excelled Sophocles. None but intellectual
cravens will affright themselves with the belief that they cannot
equal the doings of those who have gone before. True courage says,
“The laurel is never sere: its leaves are evergreen. The laurels
have not all been won: they flourish still, in abundance. The bright
examples of the past shall not deter, but cheer me. I will go on
to equal them. My life, like the lives of the earth’s truly great,
shall be devoted to thought, to research—to deep converse with the
mighty spirits who still live in their works, though their clay is
dissolved; I will prepare to build, and build carefully and wisely,
as they built; I also will rear my lasting memorial among “The
Triumphs of Perseverance!”