Volume 12 of Theodore Roosevelt's collected works gathers essays and speeches, including the title piece on the strenuous life. They discuss duty, effort, civic responsibility, and national character in his era. It is worth listening for a direct sense of Roosevelt's public ideals and rhetorical style.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
THE PRESIDENT IN THE SADDLE Mr. Roosevelt’s afternoon ride from the White House to Chevy Chase, across country and over Virginia fences THE WORKS OF Theodore Roosevelt IN FOURTEEN VOLUMES, Illustrated The Strenuous Life Executive Edition PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE PRESIDENT THROUGH SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT WITH THE CENTURY CO., MESSRS. CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, AND G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK P. F. COLLIER & SON, PUBLISHERS 12 Copyright 1900
By THE OUTLOOK COMPANY Copyright 1900 By THE CHURCHMAN COMPANY Copyright 1899 By THE S. S. McCLURE COMPANY Copyright 1899, 1900, 1901 By THE CENTURY COMPANY 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. Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ... My mariners, Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honor and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done,— . . . . . . . . . . Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. —Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Ja! diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben, Dass ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss; Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, Der täglich sie erobern muss. Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr, Hier Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tüchtig Jahr.
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