e and combining
genius which fuses force and insight in one executive intelligence,
which seizes salient points and central ideas, which darts in an instant
along the whole line of analogies and relations, which leaps with joyous
daring the vast mental spaces that separate huddled facts from
harmonizing laws,--that this power, to say the least, rarely grows after
thirty-five or forty. The mental stature is then reached, though it may
not dwindle and be dwarfed until long afterwards. Thus, Shakspeare
completed "Hamlet" when he was about thirty-six. Mozart, the Shakspeare
of composers, died at thirty-six. But why enumerate? Amid the scores of
instances which must crowd into every mind, let us select five men, of
especial historic significance, and who are commonly imaged to our minds
with heads silvered over with age,--let us take Goethe in poetry, Newton
in science, Bacon in philosophy, Columbus in discovery, Watt in
mechanics. Now, how stand the facts? The greatest works of Goethe were
conceived and partly executed when he was a young man; and if age found
him more widely and worldly wise, it found him weak in creative passion,
and, as a poet, living on the interest of his youthful conceptions.
Newton, in whose fertile and capacious intellect the dim, nebulous
elements of truth were condensed by patient thinking into the completed
star, discovered the most universal of all natural laws, the law of
gravitation, before he was twenty-five, though an error of observation,
not his own, prevented him from demonstrating it until he was forty.
Bacon had "vast contemplative ends," and had taken "all knowledge for
his province," had deeply meditated new methods and audaciously doubted
old ones, before the incipient beard had begun timidly to peep from his
youthful chin. The great conception of Columbus sprang from the thoughts
and studies of his youth; and it was the radiance shed from this
conception which gave him fortitude to bear the slow martyrdom of
poverty, contempt, and sickness of heart, which embittered the toiling
years preceding its late realization. The steam-engine was invented by
James Watt before he was thirty; but then Watt was a thinker from his
cradle. Everybody will recollect his grandmother's reproof of what she
called his idleness, at the time his boyish brain was busy with
meditations destined to ripen in the most marvellous and revolutionizing
of all industrial inventions,--an invention which, of itself alon