So do not let the thought that you are a genius abide with you for a moment—­the main traveled roads for us ordinary mortals!  The beaten paths are not so far wrong, after all; and at their end is certain, even perhaps distinguished, if not startling and historic, success.

And, besides, epoch-makers are not needed until an epoch needs to be made.

Do not worry about greatness, therefore.  If greatness is for you, God’s call will surely come to you.  If it does not—­well, the archeologists uncovered Nippur the other day, with its palaces and courts and abodes of those who were great and mighty more than 2,500 years before Abraham.

So consider Nippur, and be patient and humble.  I instanced Rhodes in naming some of the world’s monarchs of mind and will.  Very well!  Yesterday all Christendom was ringing with his imperial work.  He was developing a continent; establishing the reign of law, industry, and peace where savagery and the wilderness had held sway for a million years.

But it was yesterday that he did this.  He is dead now.  Already you have half forgotten him.  You see we are living a century in a minute.

Besides, if Clotho has not spun greatness into your destiny, be sure that it does not matter.  The reward of Cecil Rhodes was in the thing he did, and not in the memory which men have of it.  The man who digs a well has precisely the same reward.  The point is that you must do the deed for the deed’s sake.  Do not do it because the crowd will clap their hands.  When present applause or ultimate fame become your chief purpose in life, what are you, after all?  You are a play-actor—­that is what you are.  Put it from you.  Be a man.

Yes, consider Nippur, and be a man.  One lesson these ancient ruins teach—­the nothingness of fame, and that the only things in life worth while are love and duty.  I cannot think of any blessing so great to an ardent young American as to learn at the very threshold of his career of activities that duty and affection are the only things really whose value lasts and increases—­the only things that pay increasing dividends.

In a conversation in which the same view of reading given in this paper was set forth, a very bright and earnest woman questioned the propriety of such advice.  “For,” said she, “the result of that advice is to quiet rather than excite the activities and ambitions; it is to retard rather than hasten intellectual acquisition; it is to check rather than advance a young man’s career.”

But, granting that this be true, the very objection is itself one of the highest merits of the advice thus criticized.  For the only grave danger before capable young Americans, and, indeed, before our Nation, is that of hastening too much, of sweeping on too rapidly, of straining every nerve too tensely, of living our lives with an ardor all too fierce and hot.  Don’t hurry—­the world will last several millions of years longer.