Our efforts should not be casual, but causal. He who does most and does it well, becomes most. Horatius received as much land as he could plow around in a day. And you and I get each day just as much as, by putting our hand to the plow of activity, we are able to encompass by faithful plodding. Hard work is the price of all that is valuable. All the great strides in the world's achievements were made possible only by forced activity and prolonged effort. Spontaneity is a foreign element in the process of healthy and rugged development. The spider spins its web and the morning bespangles it with dew, creating a thing of beauty, but valueless. It would require the entire existence of several hundred silkworms to produce an equal amount of silk fabric. The mushroom grows up in a night, and dies in the glare of the morning sun; while the oak, struggling through the years, battling with the elements, lives a perpetual blessing to man. It is the intense struggle with the problems of life that produces in men the sturdy qualities. The short cuts to fame are few and not abiding. Success is not reached by a thornless path, but is attained by the path of plain, hard work. All things come to him who waits. Such is the very essence of an idle doctrine! All things come to him who works. Walter Scott working tirelessly in the attic while his companions below carouse the night away; Thoreau banishing himself into the lonely forest that he might prepare for larger usefulness; Dryden, "thinking on for a fortnight in a perfect frenzy;" Heyne, the German scholar, allowing himself "no more than two nights of weekly rest" for six months, that he might finish a course in Greek; Reynolds, the greatest portrait painter of England, applying his brush for thirty-six hours without stopping; Balzac, determined to be a king in literature, fighting his way with eternal diligence; William Pitt spurning difficulty and "trampling upon impossibility;" Elihu Burritt grappling with mathematics at the forge; or Isaac Newton turning his back upon a life of ease and setting off to college, where "the midnight wind swept over his papers the ashes of his long extinguished fire." These examples and thousands of others remind us that "Heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight; But they while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night." They had brains and hands too active, ambitions too aggressive, aspirations too lofty for a quiet existence, and they pressed their way onward and upward till they stood near the summit of a lofty ideal.