As every clever schoolboy is destined by himself or his friends to become Lord-Chancellor, and every private in the French army carries in his haversack the baton of a marshal, so it is a necessary ingredient of the dream of Parnassus that it should embody itself in a form of surpassing brilliance.

What distinguishes Milton from the crowd of youthful literary aspirants, _audax juventa_, is his constancy of resolve.

He not only nourished through manhood the dream of youth, keeping under the importunate instincts which carry off most ambitions in middle life into the pursuit of place, profit, honor--the thorns which spring up and smother the wheat--but carried out his dream in its integrity in old age.

He formed himself for this achievement and no other.

Study at home, travel abroad, the arena of political controversy, the public service, the practice of the domestic virtues, were so many parts of the schooling which was to make a poet.
Bismarck adopted it as the aim of his public life "to snatch Germany from Austrian oppression," and to gather round Prussia, in a North German Confederation, all the states whose tone of thought, religion, manners and interest "were in harmony with those of Prussia." "To attain this end," he once said in conversation, "I would brave all dangers--exile, the scaffold itself.