OPPORTUNITY

To the thought of the preceding poem we have here a direct answer. No matter how a man may have failed in the past, the door of opportunity is always open to him. He should not give way to useless regrets; he should know that the future is within his control, that it will be what he chooses to make it.

TH

HEY do me wrong who say I come no more When once I knock and fail to find you in; For every day I stand outside your door,

And bid you wake, and rise to fight and win.

Wail not for precious chances passed away,
Weep not for golden ages on the wane!
Each night I burn the records of the day,-
At sunrise every soul is born again!

Laugh like a boy at splendors that have sped,
To vanished joys be blind and deaf and dumb;
My judgments seal the dead past with its dead,
But never bind a moment yet to come.

Though deep in mire, wring not your hands and weep;
I lend my arm to all who say "I can!"

No shame-faced outcast ever sank so deep,
But yet might rise and be again a man!

Dost thou behold thy lost youth all aghast?
Dost reel from righteous Retribution's blow?
Then turn from blotted archives of the past,
And find the future's pages white as snow.

Art thou a mourner? Rouse thee from thy spell; Art thou a sinner? Sins may be forgiven; Each morning gives thee wings to flee from hell, Each night a star to guide thy feet to heaven. Walter Malone.

Permission of

Mrs. Ella Malone Watson.

OPPORTUNITY

In this poem yet another view of opportunity is presented. The recreant or the dreamer complains that he has no real chance. He would succeed, he says, if he had but the implements of success-money, influence, social prestige, and the like. But success lies far less in implements than in the use we make of them. What one man throws away as useless, another man seizes as the best means of victory at hand. For every one of us the materials for achievement are sufficient. The spirit that prompts us is what ultimately counts.

HIS I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:

There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's
banner

Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by
foes.

A craven hung along the battle's edge,

And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel-
That blue blade that the king's son bears,-but
this

Blunt thing!" he snapt and flung it from his
hand,

And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day.

Edward Rowland Sill.

From "Poems,"
Houghton Mifflin Co.

MY PHILOSOPHY

Though dogs persist in barking at the moon, the moon's business is not to answer the dogs or to waste strength placating them, but simply to shine. The man who strives or succeeds is sure to be criticized. Is he therefore to abstain from all effort? We are responsible for our own lives and cannot regulate them according to other people's ideas. "Whoso would be a man," says Emerson, "must be a nonconformist."

It's natchurl enugh, I guess,

When some gits more and some gits less,
Fer them-uns on the slimmest side
To claim it ain't a fare divide;

And I've knowed some to lay and wait,
And git up soon, and set up late,

To ketch some feller they could hate
For goin' at a faster gait.

My doctern is to lay aside
Contensions, and be satisfied:

Jest do your best, and praise er blame
That follers that, counts jest the same.
I've allus noticed grate success

Is mixed with troubles, more er less,
And it's the man who does the best
That gits more kicks than all the rest.

From the Biographical Edition

James Whitcomb Riley.

Of the Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley,
Copyright, 1913.

Used by special permission of the publishers,

The Bobbs-Merrill Co.