Failure

1901

"Failure," says Keats, "is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid."

Defeats and failures have played a great part in the history of success. It is not pleasant to think that more or less of defeat is absolutely necessary to great success. But that it is true every student of history knows. Defeats and failures are great developers of character. They are the gymnasia which have strengthened the muscles or manhood, the stamina, the backbone which have won victories. They have made the giants of the race by giving titanic muscles, brawny sinews, far reaching intellects.

How true it is that poverty often bides her charms under ugly masks! Thousands have been forced into greatness by their very struggle to keep the wolf from the door. She is often the only agent nature can employ to call a man out of himself and push him on toward the goal which she had fitted him to reach. Nature cares little for his ease and pleasure. It is the man she is after, and she will pay any price or resort to any expedient to lure him on. She masks her own ends in man's wants and urges him onward, oftentimes through difficulties and obstacles which are well nigh disheartening, but ever onward and upward toward the goal. — Register.