ts type, even
Arcady is its exile, not its home. Soon weary of the dalliance of Tempe,
it ascends to its mission--the archer of the silver bow, the guide of
the car of light. Speaking more plainly, genius is the enthusiasm for
self-improvement; it ceases or sleeps the moment it desists from seeking
some object which it believes of value, and by that object it insensibly
connects its self-improvement with the positive advance of the world. At
present Lenny's genius had no bias that was not to the positive and
useful. It took the direction natural to his sphere, and the wants
therein--viz., to the arts which call mechanical. He wanted to know
about steam-engines and artesian wells; and to know about them it was
necessary to know something of mechanics and hydrostatics; so he bought
popular elementary works on those mystic sciences, and set all the
powers of his mind at work on experiments.

Noble and generous spirits are ye, who, with small care for fame, and
little reward from pelf, have opened to the intellects of the poor the
portals of wisdom! I honor and revere ye; only do not think ye have done
all that is needful. Consider, I pray ye, whether so good a choice from
the Tinker's bag would have been made by a boy whom religion had not
scared from the pestilent, and genius had not led to the self-improving.
And Lenny did not wholly escape from the mephitic portions of the motley
elements from which his awakening mind drew its nurture. Think not it
was all pure oxygen that the panting lips drew in. No; there were still
those inflammatory tracts. Political I do not like to call them, for
politics mean the art of government, and the tracts I speak of assailed
all government which mankind has hitherto recognized. Sad rubbish,
perhaps, were such tracts to you, O sound thinker, in your easy-chair!
Or to you, practised statesman, at your post on the treasury bench--to
you, calm dignitary of a learned church--or to you, my lord judge, who
may often have sent from your bar to the dire Orcus of Norfolk's Isle
the ghosts of men whom that rubbish, falling simultaneously on the bumps
of acquisitiveness and combativeness, hath untimely slain. Sad rubbish
to you! But seems it such rubbish to the poor man, to whom it promises a
paradise on the easy terms of upsetting a world! For ye see, these
"Appeals to Operatives" represent that same world-upsetting as the
simplest thing imaginable--a sort of two-and-two-make-four proposition.
The