woman
who while looking through all the immaturities of his youth
"discovers" a Columbus.

Thus would I direct the divining keenness of our men of affairs, so
swift and sure to detect advantages in business, to the young men who
wait at their outer gates for recognition and service. I would invite
the world, whose hearing is so sensitive to the material things of
commerce, to the exalted and eternal subject of human characters and
human destinies as they are developing daily, hourly, all about us. In
a word, I ask the ear of the world for its young men.

I read in some sermon--I think it was by Myron Reed--that the most
pathetic thing in life is that a man of either thought or action must
spend two-thirds of his time getting a hearing. "During this time,"
said the preacher, "the man of thought speaks his immortal word; the
man of action does his immortal deed; all the time the World is
refusing to listen or to heed; but finally, when the fires of genius
have burned low, when the great thoughts have been uttered and the
great works wrought, then it is willing to give ear and eye to the
necessarily feebler acts and thoughts of the great man's later days."

It refuses to come near the fire when in full glow; it comes and puts
its hands into the ashes after the flame has died out and the ashes
themselves are growing cold. Do we not find ourselves worshiping
echoes and ghosts in the persons of men who _once_ wrought
splendidly, and denying the real forces of the present hour until they
compel recognition by their overwhelmingness; and then, having
exhausted themselves, become in their turn ghosts and echoes.

It is all right to honor those who have done big things and are
"living on their reputations"; but it is all wrong to deny to those
young men who are doing and will do big things, now and in the future,
full and glad recognition of their power and possibilities.

The first thing that the world should remember about the young man who
is confronting it, asking his daily bread of it, is the inestimable
value of the qualities of freshness, of innocence, of faith, of
confidence, of high honesty, of Don Quixote courage which the young
man brings to it. These are qualities which in human character are
worth all the wisdom of the market-place many million times
multiplied. They are the qualities which, in spite of itself, keep the
world young and tolerable.

The young man comes to the world fresh from his mother's knee.