Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/120

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and tho young god would have dwindled to a wealthy. clown.

How often have you and I longed for some special thing—fortune, position, honour—but afterwards found that, could we have obtained it, it would have been our ruin! In my own life, I have set my heart on five special things, seeking therefore with earnestness and self-denial. None of them is mine; and as one by one they fell from my hands, or slipped away from my hopes, I mourned bitterly at the “lack of success;” but already I am old enough to be thankful that four of them were impossible. The race was worth a great deal more than the prize I ran after. And is it not so with each of us? I only share the usual fortune, and am the one mouth which utters the experience common to most before me. Do we not all thank God for many a failure, a great many sorrows—so once they seemed!

Disappointment is often the salt of life. Sometimes we must warm our hands at a fire, sometimes in the snow. It is air condensed by cold which best warms the healthy blood. The greatest political are always rendered by the minority. Men of large military reputation—Hannibal, Gustavas Adolphus, Frederick, Napoleon—have done their noblest works when hard pressed by misfortune. The greatest exploits of Washington were achieved when he had the heaviest odds against him. The most illustrious oratory always thunders and lightens out of some tempest which threatens ruin to the state—and the individual speaker. The