Feasible projects often miscarry through despondency, and are strangled at birth by a cowardly imagination.

A ship on a lee shore stands out to sea to escape shipwreck.

Shrink and you will be despised.
One of Napoleon's drummer boys won the battle of Arcola.

Napoleon's little army of fourteen thousand men had fought fifty thousand Austrians for seventy-two hours; the Austrians' position enabled them to sweep the bridge of Arcola, which the French had gained and which they must hold to win the battle.

The drummer boy, on the shoulders of his sergeant (who swam across the river with him), beat the drum all the way across the river, and when on the opposite end of the bridge he beat his drum so vigorously that the Austrians, remembering the terrible French onslaught of the day before, fled in terror, thinking the French army was advancing upon them.