If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings—­nor lose the common touch,
  If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
  If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
    And—­which is more—­you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling.

From “Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 1885-1918.”

INVICTUS

Triumph in spirit over adverse conditions is the keynote of this poem of courage undismayed.  It rings with the power of the individual to guide his own destiny.

  Out of the night that covers me,
    Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
  I thank whatever gods may be
    For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance
    I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
  Under the bludgeonings of chance
    My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears
    Looms but the Horror of the shade,
  And yet the menace of the years
    Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,
    How charged with punishments the scroll,
  I am the master of my fate: 
    I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley.

IT COULDN’T BE DONE

After a thing has been done, everybody is ready to declare it easy.  But before it has been done, it is called impossible.  One reason why people fear to embark upon great enterprises is that they see all the difficulties at once.  They know they could succeed in the initial tasks, but they shrink from what is to follow.  Yet “a thing begun is half done.”  Moreover the surmounting of the first barrier gives strength and ingenuity for the harder ones beyond.  Mountains viewed from a distance seem to be unscalable.  But they can be climbed, and the way to begin is to take the first upward step.  From that moment the mountains are less high.  As Hannibal led his army across the foothills, then among the upper ranges, and finally over the loftiest peaks and passes of the Alps, or as Peary pushed farther and farther into the solitudes that encompass the North Pole, so can you achieve any purpose whatsoever if you heed not the doubters, meet each problem as it arises, and keep ever with you the assurance It Can Be Done.

  Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
    But he with a chuckle replied
  That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
    Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried. 
  So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
    On his face.  If he worried he hid it. 
  He started to sing as he tackled the thing
    That couldn’t be done, and he did it.