Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. Youth is hopeful, beautifully hopeful, and fresh, pure hearts rebound from sorrow with wonderful elasticity. When clouds lower and the way seems dark and tangled, hope flies forward, pioneer-like, to clear away all obstacles. Huge barriers frowned between Electra and the heights she strained every nerve to reach, but never for an instant did she doubt the success of the struggle. Like Orpheus seeking Eurydice, to look back was fearful and hazardous; and fixing her eyes steadily on the future, she allowed herself no haunting foreboding. " Cry, faint not I climb the summit's slope Beyond the farthest flights of hope, Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope." What human powers can endure and accomplish is to be measured only by the necessity which goads, and all herculean trophies are won by desperate needs. The laws which govern our moral and intellectual natures are as rigid and inevitable in their operation as those .vhose workings we constantly trace in the physical world; of which truth the history of nations and memoirs of great men furnish innumerable exemplifications. Consequently, it is both unjust and illogical to judge of the probability of this or that event or series of events, or the naturalness of this or that character, whether in authenticated history or fictitious works, without a thorough acquaintance with all antecedents, and the various relations surrounding the actor. Reader, as you walk side by side with these whose lives I am narrating, bear this in mind—the silver-winged pigeons that flash in and out of the venerable trees shading the old homestead, and coo and flutter amid the rainbow spray of the fountain, would droop, shiver, and die on bald, awful Alpine pinnacles, where in the fierce howl, and scourging of tempests eaglets wheel in t...