run before it.  There are movements with whose direction we sympathize, which are yet so ungoverned that we lose our freedom and the use of our reason in committing ourselves to them.  So the seaman who runs too long before the increasing gale has thereafter no election; go on he must, for there is death in pausing, though it be also death to proceed.  Learn, therefore, to wait.  Is there not many a one who never arrives at fruit, for no better reason than that he persists in plucking his own blossoms?  Learn to wait.  Take time, with the smith, to raise your arm, if you would deliver a telling blow.

Does it seem wasteful, this waiting?  Let us, then, remind ourselves that excess and precipitation are more than wasteful,—­they are directly destructive.  The fire that blazes beyond bounds not warms the house, but burns it down, and only helps infinitesimally to warm the wide out-of-doors.  Any live snail will out-travel a wrecked locomotive, and besides will leave no trail of slaughter on its track.  Though despatch be the soul of business, yet he who outruns his own feet comes to the ground, and makes no despatch,—­unless it be of himself.  Hurry is the spouse of Flurry, and the father of Confusion.  Extremes meet, and overaction steadfastly returns to the effect of non-action,—­bringing, however, the seven devils of disaster in its company.  The ocean storm which heaps the waves so high may, by a sufficient increase, blow them down again; and in no calm is the sea so level as in the extremest hurricane.

Persistent excess of outward performance works mischief in one of two directions,—­either upon the body or on the soul.  If one will not accommodate himself to this unreasonable quantity by abatement of quality,—­if he be resolute to put love, faith, and imagination into his labor, and to be alive to the very top of his brain,—­then the body enters a protest, and dyspepsia, palsy, phthisis, insanity, or somewhat of the kind, ensues.  Commonly, however, the tragedy is different from this, and deeper.  Commonly, in these cases, action loses height as it gains lateral surface; the superior faculties starve, being robbed of sustenance by this avarice of performance, and consequently of supply, on the part of the lower,—­they sit at second table, and eat of remainder-crumbs.  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.