heart its task. In such dark hours and moods, strong men reflect that
he who sows the good seed of liberty or culture or character must have
long patience until the harvest; that as things go up in value they ask
for longer time; that he is the true hero who redeems himself out of
present defeat by the foresight of far-off and future victory; that
that man has a patent of nobility from God himself who can lay out his
life upon the principle that a thousand years are as one day. The
truly great man takes long steps by God's side, has the courage of the
future; working, he can also wait.

For man, fulfilling such a career, no principle hath greater practical
value than this one; as things rise in the scale of value the interval
between seedtime and harvest must lengthen. Happily for us, God hath
capitalized this principle in nature and life. Each gardener knows
that what ripens quickest is of least worth. The mushroom needs only a
night; the moss asks a week for covering the fallen tree; the humble
vegetable asks several weeks and the strawberry a few months; but,
planting his apple tree, the gardener must wait a few years for his
ripened russet, and the woodsman many years for the full-grown oak or
elm. If in thought we go back to the dawn of creation--to that moment
when sun and planet succeeded to clouds of fire, when a red-hot earth,
cooling, put on an outer crust, when gravity drew into deep hollows the
waters that cooled the earth and purified the upper air--and then
follow on in nature's footsteps, passing up the stairway of ascending
life from lichen, moss and fern, on to the culminating moment in man,
we shall ever find that increase of value means an increase of time for
growth. The fern asks days, the reed asks weeks, the bird for months,
the beast for a handful of years, but man for an epoch measured by
twenty years and more. To grow a sage or a statesman nature asks
thirty years with which to build the basis of greatness in the bone and