s in
preparatory school and college dishearten them. They only want a
"smattering" of an education. But as Pope says,--

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."

The shifts to cover up ignorance, and "the constant trembling lest some
blunder should expose one's emptiness," are pitiable. Short cuts and
abridged methods are the demand of the hour. But the way to shorten
the road to success is to take plenty of time to lay in your reserve
power. You can't stop to forage your provender as the army advances;
if you do the enemy will get there first. Hard work, a definite aim,
and faithfulness, will shorten the way. Don't risk a life's
superstructure upon a day's foundation.

Unless you have prepared yourself to profit by your chance, the
opportunity will only make you ridiculous. A great occasion is
valuable to you just in proportion as you have educated yourself to
make use of it. Beware of that fatal facility of thoughtless speech
and superficial action which has misled many a young man into the
belief that he could make a glib tongue or a deft hand take the place
of deep study or hard work.

Patience is nature's motto. She works ages to bring a flower to
perfection. What will she not do for the greatest of her creation?
Ages and aeons are nothing to her, out of them she has been carving her
great statue, a perfect man.

Johnson said a man must turn over half a library to write one book.
When an authoress told Wordsworth she had spent six hours on a poem, he
replied that he would have spent six weeks. Think of Bishop Hall
spending thirty years on one of his works. Owens was working on the
"Commentary to the Epistle to the Hebrews" for twenty years. Moore
spent several weeks on one of his musical stanzas which reads as if it
were a dash of genius. Carlyle wrote with the utmost difficulty, and
never executed a page of his great histories till he had consulted
every known authority, so that every sentence is the quintessence of
many books, the product of many hours of drudging research in the great
libraries. To-day, "Sartor Resartus" is everywhere. You can get it
for a mere trifle at almost any bookseller's, and hundreds of thousands
of copies are scattered over the world. But when Carlyle brought it to
London in 1851, it was refused almost contemptuously by thre