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.
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.
LOWELL.
What is opportunity to a man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg,
which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.--GEORGE ELIOT.
A thousand years a poor man watched
Before the gate of Paradise:
But while one little nap he snatched,
It oped and shut. Ah! was he wise?
W. B. ALGER.
Our grand business is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to
do what lies clearly at hand.--CARLYLE.
A man's best things are nearest him,
Lie close about his feet.
R. M. MILNES.
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 law
student to Daniel Webster. "There is always room at the top," replied
the great lawyer.
* * * * * *
[Illustration: THOMAS JEFFERSON]
"The world is all gates, all opportunities to him who can use them.'
"'T is never offered twice, seize then the hour
When fortune smiles and duty points the way."
* * * * * *
No chance, no opportunities, in a land where many 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 cannot 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 others
and sold to the government.
The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold for $42 by the
owner to get money to pay his passage to other mines, where he thought
he could get rich. Professor Agassiz 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 a 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!" the old priest shouted in great excitement. "Has Ali Hafed
returned?" said the priest. "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, had he dug in his own garden, instead of going abroad in search
for wealth, and reaping poverty, hardships, starvation, and death, 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. 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 fill as ever to those who do their best; although it is not
so easy as formerly to obtain 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, not 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. Edison found them in a baggage
car. 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 that 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.
It is estimated that five out of every seven of the millionaire
manufacturers began by making with their own hands the articles which
made their fortunes. One of the greatest hindrances to advancement in
life is the lack of observation and of the inclination to take pains.
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 so
poor that he had to borrow a sickle to cut the grass in front of his
hired tenement. Now he is a very rich man.
An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
improvement in 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
said to himself, there must be some way of filling teeth which will
prevent their aching. So he invented the principle 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 gristmill. 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.
As soon as the weather would permit, the Jamestown colonists began to
stroll about the country digging for gold. In a bank of sand some
glittering particles were found, and the whole settlement was in a
state of excitement. Fourteen weeks of the precious springtime, which
ought to have been given to plowing and planting, were consumed in this
stupid nonsense. Even the Indians ridiculed the madness of the men
who, for imaginary grains of gold, were wasting their chances for a
crop of corn.
Michael Angelo found a piece of discarded Carrara marble among waste
rubbish beside a street in Florence, which some unskillful 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.
The lonely island of Nantucket would not be considered a very favorable
place to win success and fame. But Maria Mitchell, on seventy-five
dollars a year, as librarian of the Nantucket Athenaeum, found time and
opportunity to become a celebrated astronomer. Lucretia Mott, one of
America's foremost philanthropists and reformers, who made herself felt
over a whole continent, gained much of her reputation as a preacher on
Nantucket Island.
"Why does not America have fine sculptors?" asked a romping girl, of
Watertown, Mass., in 1842. Her father, a physician, answered that he
supposed "an American could be a stone-cutter, but that is a very
different thing from being a sculptor." "I think," said the plucky
maiden, "that if no other American tries it I will." She began her
studies in Boston, and walked seven miles to and fro daily between her
home and the city. The medical schools in Boston would not admit her
to study anatomy, so she had to go to St. Louis. Subsequently she went
to Rome, and there, during a long residence, and afterward, modeled and
carved very beautiful statuary which made the name of Harriet G. Hosmer
famous. Begin where you are; work where you are; the hour which you
are now wasting, dreaming of some far-off success, may be crowded with
grand possibilities.
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 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
sandal-wood, 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 sandal-wood 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.
Anna Dickinson began life as a school-teacher. Adelaide Neilson was a
child's nurse. Charlotte Cushman's parents were poor. The renowned
Jeanne d'Arc fed swine. Christine Nilsson was a poor Swedish peasant,
and ran barefoot in childhood. Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor,
overcame the prejudice against her sex and color, and pursued her
profession in Italy. Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, was the daughter
of a poor man who taught school at two dollars per week. These are but
a few of the many who have struggled with fate and risen to distinction
through their own personal efforts.
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.
When I hear of a young woman entering the medical profession, or
beginning the study of law, or entering school with a view to teaching,
I feel like congratulating her for thus asserting her individuality.
We cannot all of us perhaps make great discoveries like Newton,
Faraday, Edison, and Thompson. We cannot all of us 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
this young girl 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 a
dwelling; he must eat. He wants comforts, facilities of all kinds for
pleasure, luxuries, 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.
"We cannot doubt," said Edward Everett, "that truths now unknown are in
reserve to reward the patience and the labors of future lovers of
truth, which will go as far beyond the brilliant discoveries of the
last generation as these do beyond all that was known to the ancient
world."
The golden opportunity
Is never offered twice; seize then the hour
When fortune smiles and duty points the way;
Nor shrink aside to 'scape the spectre fear,
Nor pause, though pleasure beckon from her bower;
But bravely bear thee onward to the goal.
ANON.
For the distant still thou yearnest,
And behold the good so near;
If to use the good thou learnest,
Thou wilt surely find it here.
GOETHE.
Do not, then, stand idly waiting
For some greater work to do;
Fortune is a lazy goddess--
She will never come to you.
Go and toil in any vineyard,
Do not fear to do or dare;
If you want a field of labor,
You can find it anywhere.
ELLEN H. GATES.
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.
Work for the good that is nighest;
Dream not of greatness afar:
That glory is ever the highest
Which shines upon men as they are.
W. MORLEY PUNSHON.