sides, epoch-makers are not needed until an epoch needs to be
made.

Do not worry about greatness, therefore. If greatness is for you,
God's call will surely come to you. If it does not--well, the
archeologists uncovered Nippur the other day, with its palaces and
courts and abodes of those who were great and mighty more than 2,500
years before Abraham.

So consider Nippur, and be patient and humble. I instanced Rhodes in
naming some of the world's monarchs of mind and will. Very well!
Yesterday all Christendom was ringing with his imperial work. He was
developing a continent; establishing the reign of law, industry, and
peace where savagery and the wilderness had held sway for a million
years.

But it was _yesterday_ that he did this. He is dead now. Already you
have half forgotten him. You see we are living a century in a minute.

Besides, if Clotho has not spun greatness into your destiny, be sure
that it does not matter. The reward of Cecil Rhodes was in the thing
he did, and not in the memory which men have of it. The man who digs a
well has precisely the same reward. The point is that you must do the
deed for the deed's sake. Do not do it because the crowd will clap
their hands. When present applause or ultimate fame become your chief
purpose in life, what are you, after all? You are a play-actor--that
is what you are. Put it from you. Be a man.

Yes, consider Nippur, and be a man. One lesson these ancient ruins
teach--the nothingness of fame, and that the only things in life worth
while are love and duty. I cannot think of any blessing so great to an
ardent young American as to learn at the very threshold of his career
of activities that duty and affection are the only things really whose
value lasts and increases--the only things that pay increasing
dividends.

In a conversation in which the same view of reading given in this
paper was set forth, a very bright and earnest woman questioned the
propriety of such advice. "For," said she, "the result of that advice
is to quiet rather than excite the activities and ambitions; it is to
retard rather than hasten intellectual acquisition; it is to check
rather than advance a young man's career."

But, granting that this be true, the very objection is itself one of
the highest merits of the advice thus criticized. For the only grave
danger before capable young Americans, and, indeed, before our Nation,
is that of hastening too much, of sweeping on too rapidly, of