things named in it. Disappointment and Success are not properly
antithetic; Failure and Success are. Disappointment is the feeling
caused by failure, and caused also by other things besides failure.
Failure is the thing; disappointment is the feeling caused by the
thing; while success is the thing, and not the feeling. But such
minute points apart, the title I have chosen brings out best the
subject about which I wish to write. And a very wide subject it
is; and one of universal interest.

I suppose that no one will dispute the fact that in this world
there are such things as disappoititment and success. I do not
mean merely that each man's lot has its share of both; I mean that
there are some men whose life on the whole is a failure, and that
there are others whose life on the whole is a success. You and I,
my reader, know better than to think that life is a lottery; but
those who think it a lottery, must see that there are human beings
who draw the prizes, and others who draw the blanks. I believe in
Luck, and Ill Luck, as facts; of course I do not believe the theory
which common consent builds upon these facts. There is, of course,
no such thing as chance; this world is driven with far too tight a
rein to permit of anything whatsoever falling out in a way properly
fortuitous. But it cannot be denied that there are persona with
whom everything goes well, and other persons with whom everything
goes ill. There are people who invariably win at what are called
games of chance. There are people who invariably lose. You remember
when Sydney Smith lay on his deathbed, how he suddenly startled
the watchers by it, by breaking a long silence with a sentence from
one of his sermons, repeated in a deep, solemn voice, strange from
the dying man: His life had been successful at last; but success
had come late; and how much of disappointment he had known! And