. The delicate and divine sprites, that should bear the
behests of the soul to the will and to the houses of thought in the
brain her intuitions, are crowded out from the streets of the cerebral
cities by the mob and trample of messengers bound upon baser errands;
and thus is the soul deprived of service, and the man of inspiration.
The man becomes, accordingly, a great merchant who values a cent, but
does not value a human sentiment; or a lawyer who can convince a jury
that white is black, but cannot convince himself that white is white,
God God, and the sustaining faiths of great souls more than moonshine.
So if the apple-tree will make too much wood, it can bear no fruit;
during summer it is full of haughty thrift, but the autumn, which brings
grace to so many a dwarfed bush and low shrub, shows it naked and in
shame.

How many mistake the crowing of the cock for the rising of the sun,
albeit the cock often crows at midnight, or at the moon's rising, or
only at the advent of a lantern and a tallow candle! And yet what
a bloated, gluttonous devourer of hopes and labors is this same
precipitation! All shores are strown with wrecks of barks that went too
soon to sea. And if you launch even your well-built ship at half-tide,
what will it do but strike bottom, and stick there? The perpetual
tragedy of literary history, in especial, is this. What numbers of young
men, gifted with great imitative quickness, who, having, by virtue of
this, arrived at fine words and figures of speech, set off on their
nimble rhetorical Pegasus, keep well out of the Muse's reach ever
after! How many go conspicuously through life, snapping their smart
percussion-caps upon empty barrels, because, forsooth, powder and ball
do not come of themselves, and it takes time to load!

I know that there is a divine impatience, a rising of the waters of love
and noble pain till they _must_ overflow, with or without the hope of
immediate apparent use, and no matter what swords and revenges impend.
History records a few such defeats which are worth thousands of ordinary
victories. Yet the rule is, that precipitation comes of levity.
Eagerness is shallow. Haste is but half-earnest. If an apple is found
to grow mellow and seemingly ripe much before its fellows on the same
bough, you will probably discover, upon close inspection, that there is
a worm in it.

To be sure, any time is too soon with those who dote upon Never. There
are such as find Nature precip