He told his friend, Mr. Thayer, what he was going to do after
graduation.
"I am going to try to help the cause of better government in New
York City," he said. And he added:
"I don't know exactly how."
CHAPTER III
IN POLITICS
When he graduated from college Roosevelt was no longer in poor
health. His boxing and exercise in the gymnasium, and still more
his outdoor expeditions, and hunting trips in Maine, had made a
well man of him. He was yet to achieve strength and muscle, and
his life in the West was to give him the chance to do that.
His father died while he was in college and he was left, not rich,
but so well off that he might have lived merely amusing himself.
He might have spent his days in playing polo, hunting and
collecting specimens of animals. What he did during his life, in
adding to men's knowledge of the habits of animals, would have
gained him an honorable place in the history of American science,
if he had done nothing else. So with his writing of books. He
earned the respect of literary men, and left a longer list of
books to his credit than do most authors, and on a greater variety
of subjects. But he was to do other and still more important work
than either of these things.
He believed in and quoted from one of the noblest poems ever
written by any man,--Tennyson's "Ulysses." And in this poem are
lines which formed the text for Roosevelt's life:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life.
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