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 precipitate and God forward.  They would have effect limp at untraversable distances behind cause; they would keep destiny carefully abed and feed it upon spoon-victual.  They play duenna to the universe, and are perpetually on the qui vive, lest it escape, despite their care, into improprieties.  The year is with them too fast by so much as it removes itself from the old almanac.  The reason is that they are the old almanac.  Or, more distinctly, they are at odds with universal law, and, knowing that to them it can come only as judgment and doom, they, not daring to denounce the law itself, fall to the trick of denouncing its agents as visionaries, and its effects as premature.  The felon always finds the present an unseasonable day on which to be hanged:  the sheriff takes another view of the matter.

But the error of these consists, not in realizing good purposes too slowly and patiently, but in failing effectually to purpose good at all.  To those who truly are making it the business of their lives to accomplish worthy aims, this counsel cannot come amiss,—­TAKE TIME.  Take a year in which to thread a needle, rather than go dabbing at the texture with the naked thread.  And observe, that there is an excellence and an efficacy of slowness, no less than of quickness.  The armadillo is equally