Yes, my world-soldier, thou of the world marine-service,--thou wilt have to be greater than this tumultuous unmeasured world here round thee is: thou, in thy strong soul, as with wrestler's arms, shall embrace it, harness it down; and make it bear thee on,--to new Americas, or whither God wills!" With what concentration of purpose did Washington put the whole weight of his character into the scales of our cause in the Revolution! With what earnest singleness of aim did Lincoln in the cabinet, Grant in the field, throw his whole soul into the contest of our civil war?
The power of Phillips Brooks, at which men wondered, lay in his tremendous earnestness.
"No matter what your work is," says Emerson, "let it be yours; no matter if you are a tinker or preacher, blacksmith or president, let what you are doing be organic, let it be in your bones, and you open the door by which the affluence of heaven and earth shall stream into you." Again, he says: "God will not have His works made manifest by cowards.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.
It is a deliverance which does not deliver.

In the attempt, his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope." "I do not know how it is with others when speaking on an important question," said Henry Clay; "but on such occasions I seem to be unconscious of the external world.

Wholly engrossed by the subject before me, I lose all sense of personal identity, of time, or of surrounding objects." "I have been so busy for twenty years trying to save the souls of other people," said Livingstone, "that I had forgotten that I have one of my own until a savage auditor asked me if I felt the influence of the religion I was advocating." "Well, I've worked hard enough for it," said Malibran when a critic expressed his admiration of her D in alt, reached by running up three octaves from low D; "I've been chasing it for a month.

I pursued it everywhere,--when I was dressing, when I was doing my hair; and at last I found it on the toe of a shoe that I was putting on." "People smile at the enthusiasm of youth," said Charles Kingsley; "that enthusiasm which they themselves secretly look back at with a sigh, perhaps unconscious that it is partly their own fault that they ever lost it." "Should I die this minute," said Nelson at an important crisis, "want of frigates would be found written on my heart." Said Dr.Arnold, the celebrated instructor: "I feel more and more the need of intercourse with men who take life in earnest.