Fly in Your Own Firmament.
When downy-lipped youth first begins to peep through the knothole in the temple of knowledge, he is the happiest of all mortals because his vanity is unbridled and free.
He knows it all. When he “orates” on commencement day he robs the gardens of rhetoric and twines their choicest flowers about the beautiful, but hollow and flimsy columns of his speech. He misquotes the classic poets and taxes the old philosophers with things they never said. He twists the tail of history, strangles science, and spouts wisdom never dreamed of by Solomon. His impassioned sentences are chains of gold with blazing diamonds strung, and his tropes and similes cavort like flaming meteors athwart the intellectual heavens. But after he leaves the classic halls of college, and after a few hard bumps against the rock walls of reality, and a few hard falls on the ice pond of experience, his self-conceit springs a leak, his immense learning oozes out, and his dream of kinship with the gods vanishes into the limbo of the forever forgotten like a sweet scent before a high wind.
His vanity is un’ridled and free.
And so runs the endless story of callow youth—a comedy of errors reenacted by each successive generation, in whose quips and cranks and boyish antics we see ourselves repeated as in a mirror, and we only laugh and wish that youth might last forever—we laugh and enjoy its beautiful vanities.
But our laughter melts into sighs as we recall the Persian poet’s plaintive lines:
“Ah! that spring should vanish with the rose,
That youth’s sweet scented manuscript should close!”
Time but dissipates each rapturous dream, and the revelation of our ignorance comes with the experience of riper years. Only once are we the proud possessors of all knowledge and all wisdom, and this is in the dreamy days of life’s happy morning. And yet, we never lose our self-conceit as we advance in years; we only adjust our vanity to the knowledge we acquire. We learn how to dodge some of the jagged walls of trouble and to avoid some of the mud holes of calamity; but vanity still lures us on in myriad paths of folly. Its most dangerous form is that which conjures in men the delusion that they know everything, and that they can turn from one field of effort to another without disturbing their equilibrium and gather fruits and flowers with equal success from all alike. This is the snag upon which so many little kites get hung.
As no single honey-bee can rob all the flowers of the land, so no one mind can master all branches of knowledge. Nature has endowed humanity with different aptitudes for different lines of labor. Indeed, she seems to delight in infinite diversity. Ever true to this wonderful impulse of variation she confers on mankind intellectual gifts as multiform as her flowers—flinging them into the hovel as freely as into the palace.
A hard fall on the ice pond of experience.
One individual has the gift of speech, another the gift of thought. One talks without thinking, another thinks without talking. One man sees, hears and notes everything; another sees and hears, but notes nothing. He cannot recall whether he has been alive for the past hour or not; and if his wife asks him what manner of gown Mrs. So-and-so wore last night at the reception, he could not tell for the life of him whether she wore any gown at all. One touches business and it turns to gold; another touches it, and it turns to rags. One touches the button of politics, and the doors of office fly open with a national hymn in their hinges; another presses it, and the doors fly open to his competitor. One youth whispers a magical word into the listening ear of a laughing girl and lo! her little head of auburn curls falls upon his shoulder; another youth whispers the same word to the same girl and lo! his head falls into the sawdust! One fair maiden sings as gloriously as a lark in June skies; another thinks she sings, but doesn’t—she only screams, and her trills are a cross between a fife and a cane-mill as she twists her neck and walls her eyes like a dying swan.
But there is scarcely a human being under the sun who is not blessed with some special gift of mind for the achievement of success in some special field of endeavor.
A good old farmer and his wife had four sons, and they believed that three of them possessed talent which would some day make them great. But when they came to poor John, the youngest of the flock, they agreed that he was a natural born fool. Finally a sudden light beamed in the old man’s face and with melody in his voice he said: “Nancy, I can say one thing for John; he’s the best whistler that ever twisted wind into music—by gum.” Here was nature’s compensation for lack of brains—for John was endowed with a talent which is esteemed, in these modern days, as one of the rarest among men—a talent which might some day make John a sort of Eolian Orpheus whose slightest breath would open to him the door of fame; for have we not recently read in the public prints of a whistling artist in the person of a charming young woman who has taken the music loving world by storm and whistled herself into the choir of a rich and fashionable church?
How the hearts of the young male worshipers must thrill and palpitate when she puckers her pouting lips to join in the sacred anthem. It must be like the nectared melody of the nightingale dripping and tinkling from the heart of a puckered rose.
Many a dull and sluggish youth, blinded by vanity, is to-day frittering away the golden hours in some law college or medical school, who is totally incapable by birth of ever grasping or assimilating the principles of law or medicine, while under the leaf-fat of his stupid brain some talent may lie sleeping, which, if aroused and called into full play, might elevate him to the pedestal of glory as the champion whistler of the world.
The man of one talent, if he develops and uses it intelligently, is always the highest example of success, even in the humblest sphere. The bootblack in the street, who, by his masterful touch, makes your shoes reflect the sun, is as much an artist in his sphere and entitled to as much credit as the man who made the shoes. The difficulty is that we often rebel against Nature’s purpose, which if followed always leads to success.
It is an old saying that “Fortune is fickle,” but there is not much truth in the proverb. The trouble lies in the fact that human nature is fickle and full of vanity; and we dream ourselves into the belief that we can win applause in roles of life for which we have neither talent nor adaptation. This is vanity, and the logical result is—limbs of the law all leafless and briefless and weeping alone; business ventures dodging the sheriff and sighing for a lodge in some vast wilderness; medical aspiration hopeless and patientless in the valley of dry bones; literary spirit with broken wings and tail feathers gone; and political ambition with black eye and broken nose, sighing and singing wherever he goes:
“I am nobody’s darling,
Nobody cares for me.”
When a young man comes to choose a vocation in life let him buck-and-gag vanity and enter the field for which he is best adapted. Let him analyze and synthesize himself and approximate as nearly as possible the capacity of his mental powers. Let him study his own talent as he would study a book and when he has determined upon his calling let him pursue it without the shadow of turning, and he will surely win.