"So many promising youths, and never a finished man!" The character sympathizes with and unconsciously takes on the nature of the body.

A peevish, snarling, ailing man can not develop the vigor and strength of character which is possible to a healthy, robust, cheerful man.

There is an inherent love in the human mind for _wholeness_, a demand that man shall come up to the highest standard; and there is an inherent protest or contempt for preventable deficiency.

Nature, too, demands that man be ever at the top of his condition.
As we stand upon the seashore while the tide is coming in, one wave reaches up the beach far higher than any previous one, then recedes, and for some time none that follows comes up to its mark, but after a while the whole sea is there and beyond it.

So now and then there comes a man head and shoulders above his fellow men, showing that Nature has not lost her ideal, and after a while even the average man will overtop the highest wave of manhood yet given to the world.
Apelles hunted over Greece for many years, studying the fairest points of beautiful women, getting here an eye, there a forehead and there a nose, here a grace and there a turn of beauty, for his famous portrait of a perfect woman which enchanted the world.