Norwich bulletin., 1916-02-26
Sunday Morning Talk
THE WALL OF CIRCUMSTANCE.

THE WALL OF CIRCUMSTANCE. Even the little waves that idly dance Against the cliff vii crumble 1t to
 sand.
 And so with ceaseless toll, the slight
 est hand
 May wear away the wall of circum- stance.
 The quatrain is a favorite with Helen Keller who, surely, in her own heroic career, has eXemplified it's truth. To be born deaf, dumb and blind; to refuse to despair, to take a full college course, to come into cul- tured and useful maturity this is certainly to wear away a wall of cir constance that loomed exceeding high For uncounted millions of human travellers there are barriers in the way. Men and women all about are making headway if at all, in spite of circum- stances that hold them back. The handicap may take the form of un- happy domestic surroundings or of unfavorable business conditions. More personally it may be some defective organ of the body, dull brain, or an outlaw passion that ones great great-grandfather ought to have sub dued, and did not. The question with
  whether they shall meet opposition or no, but only as to what kind it shall be.
 recall looking out of the sleeping car window once in the early dawn when the train stopped at a little station in Pennsylvania Near the foot of an enormous slag heap some stunted, misshapen little trees were growing. The struggle of the scrubby oaks was evidently hard and their suc-
 
 discounting the courage of their att tempt, however. They were doing the best they could, and they deserved to grow. It was a parable of life.
 The average wall looks pretty high and solid to the average man. He is content to sit down on the neither side of it, without attempting an assault. By middle life one has been consider ably sobered by earlier experiences of defeat. In the dull lexicon of matur- ity there are usually several such words as fail" A sort of paralysis of the will takes possession of John Henry when things get hard. That is why things are so apt to get harder. It is the exceptional man who can press on in spite of difficulty. Such grit it is that makes him exceptional.
 To push a tunnel beneath a river, or a bridge across a canyon, to write a book, or to perfect a machine, requires skill, but first of all, patience. Morse and Bell and Marconi and Edison, to mention a single class of workers, have shown exceptional power to per sist. They have kept begging away after the other fellow has stopped. Carlyle spent several years in labor ious research and patient writing be- fore his History of the French Rev olution" was ready for the printer, Then one day, the housemaid went to his study and, seeing the manuscript lying in some confusion on his desk thought to tidy up the room b yseiZing the whole pile and throwing 1t in the fire. Average men would have been crushed by the disaster, but Carlyle simply grasped his pen anew next morning and started to rewrite his pages.
 It is open to any of us to emulate the persistence, if not the brilliancy of the great. More often than we suspect, genius proves to be just what l it has been called-inf1nite capacity for | taking pains. Let the word of poor blacksmith who became one of the foremost men of his generation in- struct us. Says Elihu Burritt: "All that have accomplished or expect tc accomplish, has been and will be by l that patient perseYering process o1 l accretfon which builds the ant hear particle by particle. though by thought fact by fact.''
 THE PARsoN