ture by the thermometer of public
deed or word. Yet the great sun himself, when he pours his noonday beams
upon some vast hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and
floating toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the
thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the moment when the first
drop trickled down its side.

How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the law
that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong, to get as
low as the earth will let it! That is genius. But what is this
transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and the rainbow, to
that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)--the great outspread
hand of God himself, forcing all things down into their places, and
keeping them there? Such, in smaller proportion, is the force of
character to the fitful movements of genius, as they are or have been
linked to each other in many a household, where one name was historic,
and the other, let me say the nobler, unknown, save by some faint
reflected ray, borrowed from its lustrous companion.

Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of the
Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle in which I
love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall ship glide by
against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible towline, with a hundred
strong arms pulling it. Her sails hung unfilled, her streamers were
drooping, she had neither side-wheel nor stern-wheel; still she moved on,
stately, in serene triumph, as if with her own life. But I knew that on
the other side of the ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam so
majestically, there was a little toiling steam-tug, with heart of fire
and arms of iron, that was hugging it close and dragging it bravely on;
and I knew, that, if the little steam-tug untwined her arms and left the
tall ship, it would wallow and roll about, and drift hither and thither,
and go off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither. And so I have
known more than one genius, high-decked, full-freighted, wide-sailed,
gay-pennoned, that, but for the bare toiling arms, and brave, warm,
beating heart of the faithful little wife, that nestled close in his
shadow, and clung to him, so that no wind or wave could part them, and
dragged him on against all the tide of circumstance, would soon have gone
down the