As it was better that youth should awkwardly strive TOWARD making,
than repose in what it found made, so is it better that age,
exempt from strife, should know, than tempt further. As in youth,
age was waited for, so in age, wait for death, without fear,
and with the absolute soul-knowledge which is independent of
the reasoning intellect of youth. It is this absolute soul-knowledge
which severs great minds from small, rather than intellectual power.

Human judgments differ. Whom shall my soul believe?
One conclusion may, at least, be rested in: a man's true success
must not be estimated by things done, which had their price
in the world; but by that which the world's coarse thumb and finger
failed to plumb; by his immature instincts and unsure purposes
which weighed not as his work in the world's estimation,
yet went toward making up the main amount of his real worth;
by thoughts which could not be contained in narrow acts,
by fancies which would not submit to the bonds of language;
by all that he strived after and could not attain, by all that was
ignored by men with only finite and realizable aims: such are
God's standards of his worth.

All the true acquisitions of the soul, all the reflected results
of its energizing after the unattainable in this life,
all that has truly BEEN, belong to the absolute, and are permanent
amid all earth's changes. It is, indeed, through these changes,
through the dance of plastic circumstance, that the permanent
is secured. They are the machinery, the Divine Potter's wheel,
which gives the soul its bent, tries it, and turns it forth
a cup for the Master's lips, sufficiently impressed.