Success Quote by Aaron Hill

"Judge in haste" is the easy part; Hill’s sharper move is the image that follows: youth "lose[s] the medium in the wild extreme". The line isn’t just a scold about impatience, it’s a diagnosis of how speed and certainty travel together. When you decide too quickly, you don’t merely risk being wrong - you slide past the workable middle into a posture. The "medium" here isn’t bland moderation for its own sake; it’s judgment with proportion, the ability to hold competing facts long enough to weigh them. Youth, in Hill’s framing, doesn’t fail because it lacks intelligence, but because it prefers intensity to calibration.

As a poet writing in early 18th-century England, Hill sits close to an era that prized "reason", balance, and social polish - the Augustan taste for measured wit over romantic excess. His language carries that cultural preference: "apt" suggests an almost mechanical tendency, a predictable bias in the young. The phrase "wild extreme" casts absolutism as a kind of emotional weather, not a principled stance. Subtext: fervor can be self-flattering. Extremes offer identity and drama; the middle demands patience, nuance, and the humility to revise.

The intent feels partly moral, partly managerial. It’s advice to the young, but also reassurance to the older reader: your caution isn’t just fear, it’s maturity. Hill’s real target is the intoxicating shortcut of instant moral certainty - a warning that still lands in any age that confuses urgency with accuracy.