How to Succeed, Orison Swett Marden [reading diary .txt] 📗
- Author: Orison Swett Marden
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Cranmer cheers his brother martyrs, and Latimer walks with a face shining with cheerfulness to the stake, upholds his fellow's spirits, and seasons all his sermons with pleasant anecdotes.
"Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches," said Emerson, "and to make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom."
In answer to the question, "How shall we overcome temptation," a noted writer said, "Cheerfulness is the first thing, cheerfulness is the second, and cheerfulness is the third." A habit of cheerfulness, enabling one to transmute apparent misfortunes into real blessings, is a fortune to a young man or young woman just crossing the threshold of active life. He who has formed a habit of looking at the bright, happy side of things, who sees the glory in the grass, the sunshine in the flowers, sermons in stones, and good in everything, has a great advantage over the chronic dyspeptic, who sees no good in anything. His habitual thought sculptures his face into beauty and touches his manner with grace.
We often forget that the priceless charm which will secure to us all these desirable gifts is within our reach. It is the charm of a sunny temper, a talisman more potent than station, more precious than gold, more to be desired than fine rubies. It is an aroma, whose fragrance fills the air with the odors of Paradise.
"It is from these enthusiastic fellows," says an admirer, "that you hear—what they fully believe, bless them!—that all countries are beautiful, all dinners grand, all pictures superb, all mountains high, all women beautiful. When such a one has come back from his country trip, after a hard year's work, he has always found the cosiest of nooks, the cheapest houses, the best of landladies, the finest views, and the best dinners. But with the other the case is indeed altered. He has always been robbed; he has positively seen nothing; his landlady was a harpy, his bedroom was unhealthy, and the mutton was so tough that he could not get his teeth through it."
"He goes on to talk of the sun in his glory," says Izaak Walton, "the fields, the meadows, the streams which they have seen, the birds which they have heard; he asks what would the blind and deaf give to see and hear what they have seen."
Of Lord Holland's sunshiny face, Rogers said: "He always comes to breakfast like a man upon whom some sudden good fortune has fallen."
But oh, for the glorious spectacles worn by the good-natured man!—oh, for those wondrous glasses, finer than the Claude Lorraine glass, which throw a sunlit view over everything, and make the heart glad with little things, and thankful for small mercies! Such glasses had honest Izaak Walton, who, coming in from a fishing expedition on the river Lea, burst out into such grateful little talks as this: "Let us, as we walk home under the cool shade of this honeysuckle hedge, mention some of the thoughts and joys that have possessed my soul since we two met. And that our present happiness may appear the greater, and we more thankful for it, I beg you to consider with me, how many do at this very time lie under the torment of the gout or the toothache, and this we have been free from; and let me tell you, that every misery I miss is a new blessing."
The hypochondriac who nurses his spleen never looks forward cheerfully, but lounges in his invalid chair, and croaks like a raven, foreboding woe. "Ah," says he, "you will never succeed; these things always fail."
The Thug of India, whose prayer is a homicide, and whose offering is the body of a victim, is melancholy.
The Fijiian, waiting to smash the skull of a victim, and to prepare a bakola for his gods, is gloomy as fear and death.
The melancholy of the Eastern Jews after their black fast, and the ill-temper of monks and nuns after their Fridays and Wednesdays, is very observable; it is the recompense which a proud nature takes out of the world for its selfish sacrifice. Melancholia is the black bile which the Greeks presumed overran and pervaded the bodies of such persons; and fasting does undoubtedly produce this.
"I once talked with a Rosicrucian about the Great Secret," said Addison. "He talked of it as a spirit that lived in an emerald, and converted everything that was near it to the highest perfection. 'It gives lustre to the sun,' said he, 'and water to the diamond. It irradiates every metal, and enriches lead with the property of gold. It brightens smoke into flame, flame into light, and light into glory. A single ray dissipates pain and care from the person on whom it falls.' Then I found his great secret was Content."
Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones,
Nor to be seen: my crown is called content:
A crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy.
—Shakespeare.
A gentle spirit gay,
You've spring perennial in your mind,
And round you make a May.
—Thackeray.
CHAPTER XXIII. HOLD UP YOUR HEAD.
Thoroughly to believe in one's own self, so one's self were thorough, were to do great things. —Tennyson.
If there be a faith that can remove mountains, it is faith in one's own power. —Marie Ebner-Eschenbach.
Let no one discourage self-reliance; it is, of all the rest, the greatest quality of true manliness. —Kossuth.
It needs a divine man to exhibit anything divine. * * * Trust thyself; every breast vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place that divine Providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so. * * * Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. —Emerson.
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
—Shakespeare.
"Yes," said a half-drunken man in a cellar to a parish visitor, a young girl, "I am a tough and a drunkard, and am just out of jail, and my wife is starving; but that doesn't give you the right to come into my house without knocking to ask questions."
Another zealous girl declared in a reform club in New York City that she always went to visit the poor in her carriage, with the crest on the door and liveried servants. "It gives me authority," she said. "They listen to my words with more respect."
The Fräulein Barbara, who founded the home for degraded and drunken sailors in London, used other means to gain influence over them. "I too," she would say, taking the poor applicant by the hand when he came to her door, "I, too, as well as you, am one of those for whom Christ died. We are brother and sister, and will help each other."
An English artist, engaged in painting a scene in the London slums, applied to the Board of Guardians of the poor in Chelsea for leave to sketch into it, as types of want and wretchedness, certain picturesque paupers then in the almshouse. The board refused permission on the ground that "a man does not cease to have self-respect and rights because he is a pauper, and that his misfortunes should not be paraded before the world."
The incident helps to throw light on the vexed problem of the intercourse of the rich with the poor. Kind but thoughtless people, who take up the work of "slumming," intent upon elevating and reforming the needy classes, are apt to forget that these unfortunates have self-respect and rights and sensitive feelings.
"But I am not derided," said Diogenes, when some one told him he was derided. "Only those are ridiculed who feel the ridicule and are discomposed by it."
Dr. Franklin used to say that if a man makes a sheep of himself the wolves will eat him. Not less true is it that if a man is supposed to be a sheep, wolves will very likely try to eat him.
"O God, assist our side," prayed the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, a general in the Prussian service, before going into battle. "At least, avoid assisting the enemy, and leave the result to me."
"If a man possesses the consciousness of what he is," said Schelling, "he will soon also learn what he ought to be; let him have a theoretical respect for himself, and a practical will soon follow." A person under the firm persuasion that he can command resources virtually has them. "Humility is the part of wisdom, and is most becoming in men," said Kossuth; "but let no one discourage self-reliance; it is, of all the rest, the greatest quality of true manliness." Froude wrote: "A tree must be rooted in the soil before it can bear flowers or fruit. A man must learn to stand upright upon his own feet, to respect himself, to be independent of charity or accident. It is on this basis only that any superstructure of intellectual cultivation worth having can possibly be built."
"I think he is a most extraordinary man," said John J. Ingalls, speaking of Grover Cleveland. "While the Senate was in session to induct Hendricks into office, I had an opportunity to study Cleveland, as he sat there like a sphinx. He occupied a seat immediately in front of the vice-president's stand, and from where I sat, I had an unobstructed view of him.
"I wanted to fathom, if possible, what manner of a man it was who had defeated us and taken the patronage of the government over to the democracy. We had a new master, so to speak, and a democrat at that, and I looked him over with a good deal of curiosity.
"There sat a man, the president of the United States, beginning his rule over the destinies of sixty millions of people, who less than three years before was an obscure lawyer, scarcely known outside of Erie County, shut up in a dingy office over a livery stable. He had been mayor of the city of Buffalo at a time when a crisis in its affairs demanded a courageous head and a firm hand and he supplied them. The little prestige thus gained made him the democratic nominee for governor, and at a time (his luck still following him) when the Republican party of the State was rent with dissensions. He was elected, and (still more luck) by the unprecedented and unheard of majority of nearly 200,000 votes. Two years later his party nominated him for president and he was elected.
"There sat this man before me, wholly undisturbed by the pageantry of the occasion, calmly waiting to perform his part in the drama, just as an actor awaits his cue to appear on a stage. It was his first visit to Washington. He had never before seen the Capitol and knew absolutely nothing of the machinery of government. All was a mystery to him, but a stranger not understanding the circumstances would have imagined that the proceedings going on before him were a part of his daily life.
"The man positively did not move a limb, shut an eye or twitch a muscle during the entire hour he sat in the Senate chamber. Nor did he betray the faintest evidence of self-consciousness or emotion,
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