eligion and patriotism: ardent states of feeling both of
them when they are genuine; yet this ardor has a great utility. It
enables men to bear much, to perform much which would be beyond their
natural force if it were not sustained by powerful mental stimulants.
And so it is in the intellectual life. It is because its labors are so
severe that its pleasures are so glorious. The Creator of intellectual
man set him the most arduous tasks--tasks that required the utmost
possible patience, courage, self-discipline, and which at the same time
were for the most part, from their very nature, likely to receive only
the most meagre and precarious pecuniary reward. Therefore, in order
that so poor and weak a creature might execute its gigantic works with
the energy necessary to their permanence, the labor itself was made
intensely attractive and interesting to the few who were fitted for it
by their constitution. Since their courage could not be maintained by
any of the common motives which carry men through ordinary
drudgery--since neither wealth nor worldly position was in their
prospects, the drudgery they had to go through was to be rewarded by the
triumphs of scientific discovery, by the felicities of artistic
expression. A divine drunkenness was given to them for their
encouragement, surpassing the gift of the grape.

But now that I have acknowledged, not ungratefully, the necessity of
that noble excitement which is the life of life, it is time for me to
add that, in the daily labor of all intellectual workers, much has to be
done which requires a robustness of the moral constitution beyond what
you appear to be aware of. It is not long since the present Bishop of
Exeter truly affirmed, in an address to a body of students, that if
there were not weariness in work, that work was not so thorough-going as
it ought to be. "Of all work," the Bishop said, "that produces results,
nine-tenths must be drudgery. There is no work, from the highest to the
lowest, which can be done well by any man who is unwilling to make that
sacrifice. Part of the very nobility of the devotion of the true workman
to his work consists in the fact that a man is not daunted by finding
that drudgery must be done; and no man can really succeed in any walk of
life without a good deal of what in ordinary English is called pluck.
That is the condition of all work whatever, and it is the condition of
all success. And there is nothing which so truly repays itse