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Now scarce the words had passed his lips, when through the dark profound
There shone a light, and with the light there came a wondrous sound;
The stranger gazed,—before his eyes a mass of burning gold,
On which unearthly light was cast, of brilliancy untold.

The light grew stronger, and he looked upon an organ fair ;
Of gold the pipes were moulded, and decked with jewels rare;
And from those pipes came melody, produced by hands unseen,
And sweet as songs of Angels, or ransomed souls, I ween.
He recked not of the flight of time, but stood enraptured there,
Until the morning dawn began to tint the heavens fair.
Then sank the organ in the marsh, the music all was still,
But echoings of those strains for years his heart and ear shall fill.
And as he stood upon the spot, and mused upon that sight
Which thus had cheered that dreary time, that solitary night,
A shepherd swain stood at his side, and courteous greeting made,
Asked how he reached that lonely spot, and proffered him his aid.
The stranger told that simple man of all the wondrous sight,
And of the music that he heard throughout the livelong night.
The peasant crossed himself, and said, "Oh, blessed thou hast been!
Few mortal eyes have ever dared to view what thou hast seen,
"'Twas long years since, that o'er our land there swept a godless foe,
And many a holy Church was burnt, and convents were laid low;
In many a solemn sanctuary the ruthless spoilers trod,
And from their peaceful dwellings they drove the men of God.

"There stood in yonder valley a Church and Convent fair,

And all around the poor man blessed the monks' protecting care.

And to their Church trooped knight and squire and dame from far and near,
The glorious golden organ on Holy-days to hear.

"But when the foreign foes came near the brethren fled away,
And wandered in the woods and hills for many a weary day.
Men said that ere they parted they cast their organ great
Into the marsh before us, their coming back to wait.

"They came not back—and in the marsh the organ still doth lie;
But once in every seven years it riseth up on high,
And melody from hands unseen doth fill the midnight air;
But to approach that charmed spot no mortal foot may dare!"

The stranger mused: "How sweet!" he said, "it is that we may know
That thus it is with our good works we leave on earth below;
We cannot carry on our flight our precious things of worth,
But they must stay, perchance concealed, behind us in the earth.
"And yet from time to time will memory bring us back to mind
By the music and the glory of the deeds we leave behind;
Perchance forgotten for awhile, but never wholly gone-
Their memory cheers the falling, and helps the weary on."

P.

399

ABOUT "FAILURES."

When we speak about failures we do not necessarily mean that some one in business finds his assets insufficient to meet his liabilities. There are numberless kinds of failures besides this. Any unsuccessful undertaking is a failure, resulting either from some mishap which we cannot help; or from some carelessness which we might have prevented. There are failures of mind and of body. There are failures necessary and unnecessary. There are failures of young and of old. Failures great, failures small; failures retrievable, and failures irretrievable; careless failures, and failures that could not be foreseen; failures that we set about remedying as soon as they happen; and failures that damp us so when they come as to ever prevent our setting about the objects we failed in again.

A failure, then, is not necessarily a commercial failure. These we can dismiss with a few words. Sometimes they can be helped, or at all events prevented. From what we have seen, however, they are frequently the effects of misfortune; at all events, the failures of small tradesmen, people doing and striving their utmost to gain a living, are such as these. People of this description almost always start again, and they fail again if they have but small capital; sometimes they succeed, and then we hear no more of them. There is another kind of failure, that of large houses and companies, where not only does the house itself fail, but drags down with it into poverty many others, and these, generally, relations and friends who have trusted them. The least said about such failures the better.

The failures, however, that we wish to speak about now are those which happen to private individuals in their private life: These affect no one but the person himself. The outer world hear nothing of them, nor would they trouble about it if they did. Failures such as these are many; many of them are only known to the circles within which they occur, many of them scarcely known even to them.

Many, if not most people, are of such a temperament, that a failure in anything they may be doing irritates them so, especially if it be in little things, that they throw the object aside in disgust, and probably do not take it up again, and this is more apparent in what are commonly called little "fiddling" things. They are so small, and seem so easy, that one is quite angry with oneself for failing in them. The best plan, perhaps, is to make up our minds before we begin to do a thing that we shall not easily succeed. To say to ourselves when we set about it, "Now I shall be sure to fail in what I am going to do, very likely a good many times." Then if we do fail we shall not be disappointed, and if we succeed the first time, it will be

all the more pleasurable if we have made up our minds to the contrary. Then there is that delightful sensation, Hope, pervading us all the time that we are at work, hope that we shall do it the first time. Hope is a very strong thing. Now strong things are better for being diluted, whatever some people may say; and so to temper the hope, fear is always present with it; fear that we shall not succeed the first time we try; so the two going on together keep up our attention and our spirit, make us careful and diligent, and prevent many failures where they seem almost inevitable.

It is strange how to-day we are able to do what to-morrow we fail in. Yet this nearly all suffer from. Doctors will tell us this is nerve; most likely it is. The eye is not so strong to-day as it was last week, and out goes the crack batsman at the first straight ball, The hand's nerves are unstrung this morning, the fishing rod or oar are held any way but firmly, and in the first place 'snick' goes the fly, in the latter the result is a 'crab.' The mind is not so firm, the brain not so clear to-day and the result is that we do not get through nearly so much Greek play, or write such elegant verses. Practice, however, will remedy this to nearly its full extent. They are failures which can be so counterbalanced by practice as at last to be made almost certainties of success; the unstrung nerve or weak mind which comes but for the day being subdued by the continual work which it is in the constant habit of performing.

We often hear of failures being put down to illness, headache, and unforeseen circumstances. Mental failures mostly have their excuse in one of these three. It is no uncommon thing to hear that a man has failed in getting his first or second class because he was unwell at the time of the examination. It may seem hard, cruel, not to believe this; but in most instances it is the want of application and industry, or lack of ability, which causes the failure. No man of course for one moment accepts the plea of unforeseen circumstances, much less any of those tales which circulate so freely about unfair examinations and hard papers. These tales are taken for what they are worth, but a man's failure is never allowed to have its excuse in either of them. How much more graceful is it, and no disgrace, to confess that the daily hours of reading were too few, or the ability inferior to the gaining of a good position.

Some persons are ever during the whole course of their lives meeting with failures. One starts as a merchant, he fails there; then he is director of some Company, he fails in being fit for it, and is rejected there; in a few years we find him somewhere in the county, and he fails there, too, as a steward, Take one of the labouring classes from a village. He starts as ploughboy, and before he is a young man he is seeking something else: he takes to reaping or turnip-hoeing, 'any work' as it is locally called, and he cannot earn a living at that: a few years and he is mason's labourer in London or some large town, and he fails at that. In a word, a man like this never seems to succeed in anything that he does; a fatality, as it is called, seems to attach to everything he does, and all his undertakings

turn out to his discredit. What causes this it is hard to determine; probably an unsettled mind, or a want of attention and care to the thing in hand. Failures of this kind, at all events, seem quite past

remedy.

One of the greatest failures of all is to see a strong man fail to keep his temper. To see a man or woman, a Christian, give way, and let all the baser parts of the body get the upper hand; to see a man violent and unapproachable like a brute beast for hours together, or perhaps sulk like a surly dog for days; this seems to lower the whole of human nature, almost to make one think that the finer points have altogether failed. Look at this strong man, as fine a specimen of the human race as one would wish to see; he is playing chess, perhaps ; as long as he is winning, well and good; but as soon as he loses, one fell swoop of the hand, and with, "I can't play any longer," away go all the men into the box. Look at the other one, all spirit, all fine feeling to day, and then some slight disappointment to-morrow; the spirit changed for a shaded brow and fallen lip, the fine feeling gone into a muttered curse and clenched teeth. What a wretched sight: what a miserable failure. Some people say that they like to see a fiery temper, a temper just like a cannon all ready primed and loaded; just put the match, in the shape of some little cross or trouble, and off it goes. Well, a fiery temper is better than a hidden one, that we can make nothing of; a disposition that we never know the bottom of, that perhaps is brewing some mischief for us at the very time we appear to be the best of friends. One of the greatest of failures is such a temper as this,-perhaps the greatest. The owners of such a disposition have invariably failed in life; not in this world's goods, but in the appreciation of this world's people. They began very likely by offending some one. They tried to make themselves, as they thought, agreeable, and they failed. This soured them, and instead of trying again they gave in; one failure did not lead to another, for they never gave it the opportunity; but thinking themselves ill-used by those around them, the thought sank deeper and deeper, wrankled more and more, till at last they seemed deep and morose to all, and all cut them. No, a quick fiery temper and a slow sulky temper are both very bad things, both great failures in governing the body; but a deep, silent, uncommunicative person is a greater failure still; keep out of the way of the former for a few hours or days, but, mind, keep out of the way of the latter as long as ever you can.

When I was at school, there was a boy there of whom it was said "that he had learnt to do everything by himself whilst he was there.” Now this everything meant swimming, skating, cricket, and the like. He was by no means a quick boy, but then nothing ever seemed to daunt him. If he fell and hurt himself he was on his legs again in a minute, trying to do without failing what he had failed in before. If his stroke in swimming was not like he wished it to be, he tried over and over again till it was done to his satisfaction. Of course he got to do everything, probably slow at first, quicker

Here was

afterwards; still he went carefully on, slow but sure. the great secret. If he failed in anything he never gave it up even to another day; he did not rest, he let nothing come between it and the accomplishing it perfectly; and then when he had done it, but not till then, he turned to something else. I have never seen or heard of him since, but doubtless he is somewhere, plodding on now, doing everything slowly, but surely; doing everything he attempts well, because he never ceases trying till he has done it well.

There are another class who fail in everything, and for this reason, that they never take the trouble to do anything well. So they go on through life, always able to do something of everything, but never doing anything perfectly. There is a great secret in doing everything well, (this to our young readers.) If you fail in doing a thing, never rest till you succeed, for as sure as you leave it whilst you are young, you will never be able to accomplish it half so well after you grow up. Most boys abominate fagging at cricket so much when first they begin, but the more of it then, the better cricketer afterwards. So, too, with work. To be able to write good Latin when we are men, we must do all the drudgery when boys. Thus it is with everything under the sun, whether work or play; it is worthy of notice that in general a man succeeds in all he does or in nothing; if he is good at work he is good at play too, if he is but a meagre player he will be but an ill workman. When we were children in the nursery, nurse used to sing us a very pretty little song, the refrain of which was, as far as we can remember

"If you don't succeed at once,

Try, try, try again."

Or, resolved into prose," Persevere." It is only a word of three syllables, but it is the pole-star of many a life, the foundation of many a genius. It is the antidote for all failures. If you are afraid to try it,— if the failure seems so great that no amount of trying you imagine can overcome it, just put on your hat and go out for a quiet walk, and in your walk obsorve some of the inferior creatures of creation. If it is in the Autumn, almost winter, just as the leaves are coming down in showers, go by the river to some weir or cascade. Look at that trout in the clear bright water, what a size he is, quite two pounds. One dash and up he goes over the weir, though it is some eight steps high. He has been over before, and he knows the way well; one sudden dash, all its weight on the tail, and up it springs. But what follows; a thin silvery streak in the mid-day sunshine, up four steps and as quickly back the four again. Only half way up; he tries again, and only the same distance. This one is not up to half a pound, but his ambition to get up stream is just as great as that of his heavier companion. One try more, little fish. Ah! well done, five steps this time. That fish has never been in the nursery, never learnt the old nursery rhyme, but still he perseveres, tries and tries and tries again, despite all his failures, all his tumbling backward.

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