What delays also in justice!  What recognition does society withhold from its heroes!  What praise speaks above the pulseless corpse that is denied the living, hungering heart!  What gold coin spent for the marble wreath by those who have no copper for laurel for the living hero!  How do rewards that dazzle in prospect, in possession, burst like gaudy bubbles!  Honors are evanescent; reputation is a vapor; property takes wings; possessions counted firm as adamant dissolve like painted clouds; in the hour of depression the hand drops its tool, the heart its task.  In such dark hours and moods, strong men reflect that he who sows the good seed of liberty or culture or character must have long patience until the harvest; that as things go up in value they ask for longer time; that he is the true hero who redeems himself out of present defeat by the foresight of far-off and future victory; that that man has a patent of nobility from God himself who can lay out his life upon the principle that a thousand years are as one day.  The truly great man takes long steps by God’s side, has the courage of the future; working, he can also wait.

For man, fulfilling such a career, no principle hath greater practical value than this one; as things rise in the scale of value the interval between seedtime and harvest must lengthen.  Happily for us, God hath capitalized this principle in nature and life.  Each gardener knows that what ripens quickest is of least worth.  The mushroom needs only a night; the moss asks a week for covering the fallen tree; the humble vegetable asks several weeks and the strawberry a few months; but, planting his apple tree, the gardener must wait a few years for his ripened russet, and the woodsman many years for the full-grown oak or elm.  If in thought we go back to the dawn of creation—­to that moment when sun and planet succeeded to clouds of fire, when a red-hot earth, cooling, put on an outer crust, when gravity drew into deep hollows the waters that cooled the earth and purified the upper air—­and then follow on in nature’s footsteps, passing up the stairway of ascending life from lichen, moss and fern, on to the culminating moment in man, we shall ever find that increase of value means an increase of time for growth.  The fern asks days, the reed asks weeks, the bird for months, the beast for a handful of years, but man for an epoch measured by twenty years and more.  To grow a sage or a statesman nature asks thirty years with which to build the basis of greatness in the bone and muscle of the peasant grandparents, thirty years in which to compact the nerve and brain of parents; thirty years more in which the heir of these ancestral gifts shall enter into full-orbed power and stand forth fully furnished for his task.  Nature makes a dead snowflake in a night, but not a living star-flower.  For her best things nature asks long time.