made extemporaneously; but such speeches are never made without long and
arduous preparation. "The gods sell anything and to everybody at a fair
price," says Emerson; and he might have added that they give nothing away.
Whatever a man secures in the way of power or fame he pays for in
preliminary preparation; nothing is given him except his native capacity;
everything else he must pay for. To recognise opportunity when it comes,
or to make the highest use of it when it is not to be recognised at the
moment, involves constant enrichment and education of the whole nature.

It is one of the secrets of the higher kind of success to make life
interesting, and this secret is committed mainly to those who get the
educational value of events, conditions, and relationships. The man who
can rationalise his entire experience is in the way of learning the
deepest lesson of life and of keeping the keenest interest in all its
happenings. A mass of facts exhausts and wearies the student, but when
they fall into order, disclose connections, and reveal truth they awaken
enthusiasm. The body of fact without the soul of truth is a dead and
repellent thing; but if the soul of truth shine through straightway it
becomes vital, companionable, stimulating. Now, the most fruitful
preparation for opportunities and tasks of all degrees of importance is
that attitude towards life which habitually secures from it the truth
behind the experience and the principle behind the fact. Some men are
enriched by everything they touch because they seem instinctively to get
at the spiritual meaning of events; other men get nothing but material
results from their dealing with the world. One man takes nothing off his
broad acres but crops; another harvests his crops with as large results,
but harvests also knowledge of the chemistry of nature, appreciation of
the landscape beyond his own fields, and those qualities of character
which have their root in honest work in the open fields.