| Making the Most of Life |
Chapter 17 |
Page 5 |
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 tings, 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 splendour. 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.
‘Tis the transition stage, the tug and strain,
That strike men: standing still is stupid-like.”
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