All this improvement
DID NOT COME IN A WEEK OR A YEAR,
but it led to his permanent engagement in a substantial enterprise of
the kind, where work, elegant and original, will always await him, and
where his usefulness is ever apparent to the most unwilling
investigator. From being the victim of the most cruel circumstances
which a man in health ever encountered under my observation, he has
become the valued companion of the leaders of thought, of art, and of
music, and I feel confident that the whole of his ultimate success at
one time in his career depended on the fact that he had more hope than
any other man I ever saw.
HOPE IS LIKE THE CORK TO THE NET,
which keeps the soul from sinking in despair. Hope is the sun, which as
we journey towards it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us. Dr.
Johnson has well and truly said that the flights of the human mind are
not from enjoyment to enjoyment, but from hope to hope. It is a strange
frailty of human nature that we part more willingly with what we really
possess than with our expectations of what we wish for. The man who
curbs this tendency is known as a man of wisdom.
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