And you will further find, when you come to measure yourself with men,
that there are no rivals so formidable as those earnest, determined
minds which reckon the value of every hour, and which achieve eminence
by persistent application.
Literary ambition may inflame you at certain periods and a thought of
some great names will flash like a spark into the mine of your purposes;
you dream till midnight over books; you set up shadows, and chase them
down,--other shadows, and they fly. Dreaming will never catch them.
Nothing makes the "scent lie well" in the hunt after distinction, but
labor.
And it is a glorious thing, when once you are weary of the dissipation,
and the _ennui_ of your own aimless thought, to take up some glowing
page of an earnest thinker, and read--deep and long, until you feel the
metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your
flinty lethargy flashes of ideas that give the mind light and heat. And
away you go in the chase of what the soul within is creating on the
instant, and you wonder at the fecundity of what seemed so barren, and
at the ripeness of what seemed so crude. The glow of toil wakes you to
the consciousness of your real capacities: you feel sure that they have
taken a new step toward final development.
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