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.

Perseverance

1901

With perseverance the very odds and ends of time may be worked up into results of the greatest value. An hour in every day withdrawn from frivolous pursuits would, if properly employed, enable any man of ordinary capacity very shortly to master a complete science. It would make an ignorant man a well informed man in ten years. We must not allow the time to pass without yielding fruits in the form of something learned worthy of being known, some good principle cultivated or some good habit strengthened.

Travesty on Real Falstaff

1915

Yarmouth has a claim upon all Englishmen quite independently of its associations with the breakfast bloater, remarks a writer in St Nicholas. For it was the home of Shakespeare's Falstaff, who appears to have been a man of exemplary piety. The Falstaffs were an old Yarmouth family.

"A Falstolfe or Falstaff," writes John Richard Green, "was bailiff of Yarmouth in 1281. Another is among the first of its representatives in parliament, and from that the members of that family filled the highest municipal offices. John Falstolfe, a man of considerable account in the town, purchased lands at the close of the fourteenth century in Caistor, and became the father of Sir John Falstolfe, who, after a distinguished military career, was luckless enough to give his name to Shakespeare's famous character. In Yarmouth, however, he was better known as a benefactor to the great church of St. Nicholas.


Failures as Stepping Stones

John Wanamaker, in a recent address in Philadelphia, urged his audience to persevere.

"Every successful man," he said, "has probably had more failures, far more failures, than the nonentity has had.

"Success, after all, is nothing more than failure with a new coat of paint."

How Long to Sleep

1874

There has been a great deal of trash written and labeled "Hygienic;" but the following so entirely accords with our own experience, that we commend it to readers as sensible:

The fact is, that as life becomes concentrated, and its pursuits more eager, short sleep and early rising becomes impossible. We take more sleep than our ancestors, and we take more because we want more. Six hours' sleep will do very well for a plowman or brick-layer, or any other man who has no exhaustion but that produced by manual labor, and the sooner he takes it after his labor is over the better. But for a man whose labor is mental, the stress of work is on his brain and nervous system, and for him who is tired in the evening with a day of mental application, neither early to bed nor early to rise is wholesome. He needs letting down to the level of repose.

The longer the interval between the active use of the brain and his retirement to bed, the better his chance of sleep and refreshment. To him an hour after midnight is probably as good as two hours before it, and even then his sleep will not so completely and quickly restore him as it will his neighbor who is physically tired. He must not only go to bed later, but lie longer. His best sleep probably lies in the early morning hours, when all the nervous excitement has passed away, and he is in absolute rest.

Note: Please don't take this old article for true advice on your own sleeping. I had to read it a couple time because I can't believe my eyes. The author discounts the exhaustion of a man who plows or lays bricks as something less than one whose labor is more mental. And since the author was a writer, guess who is being talked about there. It would seem that he or she is feeling a bit superior to those others. It seems like the truth would be just the opposite, or neither. There's a lot of looking-down on people in these old articles, a lot of snobby upper class hoity-toityness.


Perseverance

A poor woman had a supply of coals laid at her door by a charitable neighbor. A very little girl came out with a fire-shovel, and began to take a shovelful at a time and carry it to a sort of bin in the cellar. I said: "Do you expect to get all that coal in with your little shovel?" She was quite confused with my question, but her answer was striking: "Yes, sir; if I work long enough." Humble worker, make up for your want of ability by abundant continuance in well-doing, and your lifework will not be trivial. The repetition of small efforts will effect more than the occasional use of great talents.