length he should cry, "Up, Guards, and at them !" What Cecil said of
Raleigh, "He can toil terribly," has been styled "an electric touch";
but the "masterly inactivity" of Sir James Mackintosh, happily
appropriated by Mr. Calhoun, carries an equal appeal to intuitive sense,
and has already become proverbial. He is no sufficient hero who in the
delays of Destiny, when his way is hedged up and his hope deferred,
cannot reserve his strength and bide his time. The power of acting
greatly includes that of greatly abstaining from action. The leader of
an epoch in affairs should therefore be some Alfred, Bruce, Gustavus
Vasa, Cromwell, Washington, Garibaldi, who can wait while the iron of
opportunity heats at the forge of time; and then, in the moment of its
white glow, can so smite as to shape it forever to the uses of mankind.

One should be able not only to wait, but to wait strenuously, sternly,
immovably, rooted in his repose like a mountain oak in the soil; for
it may easily happen that the necessity of refraining shall be most
imperative precisely when, the external pressure toward action is most
vehement. Amid the violent urgency of events, therefore, one should
learn the art of the mariner, who, in time of storm lies to, with sails
mostly furled, until milder gales permit him again to spread sail
and stretch away. With us, as with him, even a fair wind may blow so
fiercely that one cannot safely 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.