It is the intense struggle with the problems of life that produces in
men the sturdy qualities. The short cuts to fame are few and not
abiding. Success is not reached by a thornless path, but is attained by
the path of plain, hard work. All things come to him who waits. Such is
the very essence of an idle doctrine! All things come to him who works.
Walter Scott working tirelessly in the attic while his companions below
carouse the night away; Thoreau banishing himself into the lonely
forest that he might prepare for larger usefulness; Dryden, "thinking
on for a fortnight in a perfect frenzy;" Heyne, the German scholar,
allowing himself "no more than two nights of weekly rest" for six
months, that he might finish a course in Greek; Reynolds, the greatest
portrait painter of England, applying his brush for thirty-six hours
without stopping; Balzac, determined to be a king in literature,
fighting his way with eternal diligence; William Pitt spurning
difficulty and "trampling upon impossibility;" Elihu Burritt grappling
with mathematics at the forge; or Isaac Newton turning his back upon a
life of ease and setting off to college, where "the midnight wind swept
over his papers the ashes of his long extinguished fire." These
examples and thousands of others remind us that

"Heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight;
But they while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night."

They had brains and hands too active, ambitions too aggressive,
aspirations too lofty for a quiet existence, and they pressed their way
onward and upward till they stood near the summit of a lofty ideal.

When Xerxes, that great Persian monarch, seated upon a throne of ivory and