Opportunity

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power that belongs to nothing else, to lay the stress of all our hoping and doing on the things that cannot pass away.

"Poverty," says Ouida, "is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings." " Lowliness is young ambition's ladder." What is more pleasant than to read of stronghearted youths, who, in the midst of want and hardships of many kinds, have clung to books, feeding, like bees to flowers? By the light of pine-logs, in dim-lit garrets, in the fields following the plough, in early dawns when others are asleep, they ply their blessed task, seeking nourishment for the mind, athirst for truth, yearning for full sight of the high worlds of which they have caught faint glimpses; happier now, lacking everything save faith and a great purpose, than in after years when success shall shower on them applause and gold. Life is good, and opportunities of becoming and doing good are always with us. Our house, our table, our tools, our books, our city

If loss or pain or wrong befall me, shall they not show me the soul of good there is in things evil? Good fortune may serve to persuade us that the essential good is a noble mind and a conscience without flaw. Success will make plain the things in which we fail: failure shall spur us on to braver hope and striving. If I am left alone, yet God and all the heroic dead are with me still. If a great city is my dwelling place, the superficial life of noise and haste shall teach me how blessed a thing it is to live within in the company of true thoughts and high resolves. Whatever can help me to think and love, whatever can give me strength and patience, whatever can make me humble and serviceable, though it be a trifle light as air, is opportunity, whose whim it is to hide in unconsidered things, in chance acquaintance and casual speech, in the falling of an apple, in floating weeds, or the accidental explosion in a chemist's mortar.