"Rest not! life is sweeping by,
Do and dare before you die;
Something mighty and sublime
Leave behind to conquer time;
Glorious 'tis to live for aye
When these forms have passed away.
"Haste not! rest not! calmly wait;
Meekly bear the storm of fate;
Duty be thy polar guide;
Do the right whate'er betide.
Haste not! rest not! Conflicts past,
God shall crown thy work at last."
There is another phase of the lesson. Not swiftness only, but patient
persistence through days and years, is the mark of true living. There
are many people who can work under pressure for a little time, but who
tire of the monotony and slack in their duty by and by, failing at last
because they cannot endure unto the end. There are people who begin
many noble things, but soon weary of them and drop them out of their
hands. They may pass for brilliant men, men even of genius, but in the
end they have for biography only a volume of fragments of chapters, not
one of them finished. Such men may attract a great deal of passing
attention, while the tireless plodders working beside them receive no
praise, no commendation; but in the real records of life, written in
abiding lines in God's Book, it is the latter who will shine in the
brightest splendor. Robert Browning puts this truth in striking way in
one of his poems:--
"Now, observe,
Sustaining is no brilliant self-display
Like knocking down or even setting up:
Much bustle these necessitate; and still
To vulgar eye, the mightier of the myth
Is Hercules, who substitutes his own
For Atlas' shoulder and supports the globe
A whole day,--not the passive and obscure
Atlas who bore, ere Hercules was born,
And is to go on bearing that same load
When Hercules turns ash on Oeta's top.
Pages:
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140