Theodore Roosevelt had the good fortune to be born of a well-known, long-established family, with every facility for education and with an atmosphere of patriotism and disinterested service both to country and humanity all about him. In his father he had before him an example of lofty public spirit, from which it would have been difficult to depart. But if the work of his ancestors relieved him from the hard struggle which meets an unaided man at the outset, he also lacked the spur of necessity to prick the sides of his intent, in itself no small loss. As a balance to the opportunity which was his without labor, he had not only the later difficulties which come to him to whom fate has been kind at the start; he had also spread before him the temptations inseparable from such inherited advantages as fell to his lot--temptations to a life of sports and pleasure, to lettered ease, to an amateur's career in one of the fine arts, perhaps to a money-making business, likewise an inheritance, none of them easily to be set aside in obedience to the stern rule that the larger and more facile the opportunity the greater and more insistent the responsibility. How he refused to tread the pleasant paths that opened to him on all sides and took the instant way which led over the rough road of toil and action his life discloses. At the beginning, moreover, he had physical difficulties not lightly to be overcome. He was a delicate child, suffering acutely from attacks of asthma. He was not a strong boy, was retiring, fond of books, and with an intense but solitary devotion to natural history. As his health gradually improved he became possessed by the belief, although he perhaps did not then formulate it, that in the fields of active life a man could do that which he willed to do; and this faith was with him to the end. It became very evident when he went to Harvard. He made himself an athlete by sheer hard work. Hampered by extreme near-sightedness, he became none the less a formidable boxer and an excellent shot. He stood high in scholarship, but as he worked hard, so he played hard, and was popular in the university and beloved by his friends. For a shy and delicate boy all this meant solid achievement, as well as unusual determination and force of will. Apparently he took early to heart and carried out to fulfillment the noble lines of Clough's _Dipsychus_: In light things Prove thou the arms thou long'st to glorify, Nor fear to work up from the lowest ranks Whence come great Nature's Captains. And high deeds Haunt not the fringy edges of the fight, But the pell-mell of men.