you; it would also be easy to fail. Many have tried and failed. This is a
deeply personal matter. I can not tell what book, or what passage in a
book, will touch the magic spring that shall make your life useful instead
of useless, that shall start your thoughts and your deeds climbing up
instead of grovelling or passively waiting. Only search will reveal it.
The diamond-miner who expects to be directed to the precise spot where he
will find a gem will never pick one up. Only he who seeks, finds. There
are, however, places to look and places to avoid. The peculiar clay in
which diamonds occur is well known to mineralogists. He who runs across
it, looks for diamonds, though he may find none. But he who hunts for them
on the rock-ribbed hills of New Hampshire or the sea-sands of Florida is
doing a foolish thing--although even there he may conceivably pick up one
that has been dropped by accident.

So you may know where it is best to go in your search for inspiration from
books, for we know where seekers in the past have most often found it. He
who could read the Bible or Shakespeare without finding some of it is the
exception. It may be looked for in the great poets--Homer, Virgil, Dante,
Chaucer, Milton, Hugo, Keats, Goethe; or the great historians--Tacitus,
Herodotus, Froissart, Macaulay, Taine, Bancroft; or in the great
travellers from Sir John Mandeville down, or in biographies like Boswell's
life of Johnson, or in books of science--Laplace, Lagrange, Darwin,
Tyndall, Helmholtz; in the lives of the great artists; in the great novels
and romances--Thackeray, Balzac, Hawthorne, Dickens, George Eliot. Yet
each and all of these may leave you cold and may pick up your gem in some
out-of-the-way corner where neither you nor anyone else would think of
looking for it.

Did you ever see a car-conductor fumbling about in the dark with the
trolley pole, trying to hit the wire? While he is pulling it down and