There are no more interesting pages in biography than those which record how Emerson, as a child, was unable to read the second volume of a certain book, because his widowed mother could not afford the amount (five cents) necessary to obtain it from the circulating library.

“Poor fellow!” said Emerson, as he looked at his delicately-reared little son, “how much he loses by not having to go through the hard experiences I had in my youth.”

It was through the necessity laid upon him to earn that Emerson made his first great success in life as a teacher.  “I know,” he said, “no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that tenacity of purpose, which, through all change of companions or parties or fortunes, changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but wearies out opposition and arrives at its port.”

“SHE CAN NEVER SUCCEED.”

Louisa Alcott earned two hundred thousand dollars by her pen.  Yet, when she was first dreaming of her power, her father handed her a manuscript one day that had been rejected by Mr. Fields, editor of the “Atlantic,” with the message: 

“Tell Louisa to stick to her teaching; she can never succeed as a writer.”

“Tell him I will succeed as a writer, and some day I shall write for the ‘Atlantic.’”

Not long after she wrote for the “Atlantic” a poem that Longfellow attributed to Emerson.  And there came a time when she wrote in her diary: 

“Twenty years ago I resolved to make the family independent if I could.  At forty, that is done.  Debts all paid, even the outlawed ones, and we have enough to be comfortable.  It has cost me my health, perhaps.”

“I TRAMPLE ON IMPOSSIBILITIES”: 

So it was said by Lord Chatham.  “Why,” asked Mirabeau, “should we call ourselves men, unless it be to succeed in everything everywhere?”

“It is all very well,” said Charles J. Fox, “to tell me that a young man has distinguished himself by a brilliant first speech.  He may go on satisfied with his first triumph; but show me a young man who has not succeeded at first, and has then gone on, and I will back that man to do better than those who succeeded at the first trial.”  Cobden broke down completely the first time he appeared on a platform in Manchester, and the chairman apologized for him; but he did not give up speaking until every poor man in England had a larger, better, and cheaper loaf.  Young Disraeli sprung from a hated and persecuted race, pushed his way up through the middle classes and upper classes, until he stood self-poised upon the topmost round of political and social power.  At first he was scoffed at, ridiculed, rebuffed, hissed from the House of Commons; he simply said, “The time will come when you will hear me.”  The time did come, and he swayed the sceptre of England for a quarter of a century.

How massive was the incalculable reserve power of Lincoln as a youth; or of President Garfield, wood-chopper, bell-ringer, and sweeper-general in college!