Parenting & Family Quote by William C. Bryant

“Difficulty” arrives here not as a problem to solve but as a bodily regimen, almost a Victorian gymnasium with a disciplinary streak. Bryant’s metaphor does two clever things at once: it sentimentalizes hardship (a “nurse” implies care, purpose, even moral legitimacy) while refusing to prettify it (“harsh,” “roughly rocks”). Greatness, in this framing, isn’t born; it’s fostered, shaped by someone else’s hands. That word choice quietly revises the American fantasy of pure self-making. You may end up “great,” but you are also, uncomfortably, someone’s foster-child - dependent on forces you didn’t choose.

The address “my brethren” matters too. Bryant isn’t whispering private consolation; he’s preaching a social ethic. It’s a communal pep talk aimed at readers who likely understood difficulty as both spiritual trial and national narrative. Mid-19th-century America was obsessed with cultivation: of bodies, of character, of the republic itself. “Athletic proportion” pulls the moral lesson into the era’s emerging fixation on vigor, self-control, and visible sturdiness - a politics of the physique, where strength signals virtue.

The subtext is bracingly unsentimental: hardship is not an interruption to the good life; it is the machinery that manufactures the kind of person the culture agrees to admire. Bryant’s line works because it flatters the suffering reader without letting them off the hook. If difficulty is a nurse, it won’t coddle you. It will raise you.