The philosopher gets his track by observation; the poet trusts to his inner sense, and makes the straighter and swifter line.
And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest instinct more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the suggestion of reason? What is a bee's architecture but an unobstructed divine thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule but an obstructed thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect copy of some absolute rule Divine Wisdom has established, transmitted through a human soul as an image through clouded glass?
Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family, but rarely a whole brood of either.Talent is often to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied.It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.
It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private truth.
--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making their way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius, and very likely do not want to know any more.For a divine instinct, such as drives the goose southward and the poet heavenward, is a hard thing to manage, and proves too strong for many whom it possesses.It must have been a terrible thing to have a friend like Chatterton or Burns.And here is a being who certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in tendency, if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and genius grafted on womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as you may see a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot keep pace with its evolution.
I think now you know something of this young person.She wants nothing but an atmosphere to expand in.Now and then one meets with a nature for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously utterly incompetent.It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by accident in one of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow into flower among the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that surround it.There is no question that certain persons who are born among us find themselves many degrees too far north.Tropical by organization, they cannot fight for life with our eastern and northwestern breezes without losing the color and fragrance into which their lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles and oranges.Strange effects are produced by suffering any living thing to be developed under conditions such as Nature had not intended for it.A French physiologist confined some tadpoles under water in the dark.Removed from the natural stimulus of light, they did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their growth, and so become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic tadpoles.
I have seen a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown Zarvce or embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants should look on a considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-nine millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs, and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven into the lungs made to receive it.Of course we never try to keep young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been bred and fed! Never! Never.Never?
Now to go back to our plant.You may know, that, for the earlier stages of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air, water, light, and warmth.But by-and-by, if it is to have special complex principles as a part of its organization, they must be supplied by the soil;--your pears will crack, if the root of the tree gets no iron,--your asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do.
Just at the period of adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to come into flower and to set its fruit.Then it is that many young natures, having exhausted the spiritual soil round them of all it contains of the elements they demand, wither away, undeveloped and uncolored, unless they are transplanted.
Pray for these dear young souls! This is the second natural birth;-for I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which form the point of transition in many lives between the consciousness of a general relation to the Divine nature and a special personal relation.The litany should count a prayer for them in the list of its supplications; masses should be said for them as for souls in purgatory; all good Christians should remember them as they remember those in peril through travel or sickness or in warfare.
I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will.She should ripen under an Italian sun.She should walk under the frescoed vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of Venetian beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with the Greek marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil.Has she not exhausted this lean soil of the elements her growing nature requires?
I do not know.The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on Cape Ann, many degrees out of its proper region.I was riding once along that delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we passed a thicket where there seemed to be a chance of finding it.
In five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers.I could not believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the colored fringe worn from all its border.
