There is a tremendous force in the enthusiasm of
your freshly formed plan. You have contributed largely to the defeat
of your scheme when you have permitted yourself to doubt it."
It was only the other day that the newspapers were full of an
extraordinary achievement of one of the American magicians of
business; and the papers said that the remarkable thing about it was
that the plan flashed upon him in a single evening, as he was leaving
for a long vacation. He acted upon it instantly, and devoted his
fortune, reputation, almost life, to its consummation. He succeeded.
If he had taken six months to have thought over it, his conception
would have been abandoned.
While this man's plan came on him in an evening, a study of his life
shows that, unconsciously to himself, it had been growing for a long
series of years. It flowered out all at once, like the night-blooming
cereus. Caesar decided to cross the Rubicon on the instant? Yes, but we
cannot doubt that this imperial resolution had been formed the day
when in the Forum, as Macaulay describes it, Caesar said that the
future Dictator of Rome might be Pompey, or Crassus, or still
somebody else whom nobody was thinking of (that somebody else being
himself, of course).
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