his life in the West was to give him the chance to do that.

His father died while he was in college and he was left, not rich,
but so well off that he might have lived merely amusing himself.
He might have spent his days in playing polo, hunting and
collecting specimens of animals. What he did during his life, in
adding to men's knowledge of the habits of animals, would have
gained him an honorable place in the history of American science,
if he had done nothing else. So with his writing of books. He
earned the respect of literary men, and left a longer list of
books to his credit than do most authors, and on a greater variety
of subjects. But he was to do other and still more important work
than either of these things.

He believed in and quoted from one of the noblest poems ever
written by any man,--Tennyson's "Ulysses." And in this poem are
lines which formed the text for Roosevelt's life:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life.

This was the doctrine of "the strenuous life" which he preached,--
and practiced. It was to perform the hard necessary work of the
world, not to sit back and criticize. It was to do disagreeable
work if it had to be done, not to pick out the soft jobs. It was
to be afraid neither of the man who fights with his fists or with
a rifle, nor of the man who fights with a sneering tongue or a
sarcastic pen.