distinction of a candid disputant or of a reader of good
faith, is his willingness to take pains to see the points of
reconciliation among different aspects and different expressions of
what is substantially the same judgment.

Then, again, nobody here needs to be reminded that the great
successes of the world have been affairs of a second, a third, nay, a
fiftieth trial. The history of literature, of science, of art, of
industrial achievements, all testify to the truth that success is only
the last term of what looked like a series of failures. What is true
of the great achievements of history, is true also of the little
achievements of the observant cultivator of his own understanding. If
a man is despondent about his work, the best remedy that I can
prescribe to him is to turn to a good biography; there he will find
that other men before him have known the dreary reaction that follows
long-sustained effort, and he will find that one of the differences
between the first-rate man and the fifth-rate lies in the rigour with
which the first-rate man recovers from this reaction, and crushes it
down, and again flings himself once more upon the breach. I remember
the wisest and most virtuous man I have ever known, or am ever likely
to know--Mr. Mill--once saying to me that whenever he had written
anything, he always felt profoundly dissatisfied with it, and it was
only by reflecting that he had felt the same about other pieces of
which the world had thought well, that he could bring himself to send
the new production to the printer. The heroism of the scholar and the
truth-seeker is not less admirable than the heroism of the
man-at-arms.

Finally, you none of you need to be reminded of the most central and
important of all the commonplaces of the student--that the stuff of
which life is made is Time; that it is better, as Goethe said, to do
the most trifling thing in the world than to think half an hour a
trifling thing. Nobody means by this that we are to have no pleasures.
Where time is lost and wasted is where many people lose and waste
their money--in things that are neither pleasure nor business--in
those random and officious sociabilities, which neither refresh nor
instruct nor invigorate, but only fret and benumb and wear all edge
off the mind. All these things, however, you have all of you often
thought about; yet, alas, we are so ready to forget, both in these
matters and in other and weightier, how irrevocable ar