ust as much as you need to know that of your
horse, or that of your friend. I know, of course, there is a mechanical
reason for this seeming caprice, if you could trace the reason. But not
one man in a thousand could trace out the reason. And the phenomenon, as
it presses itself upon us, really amounts to this: that very complicated
machinery appears to have a will of its own,--appears to exercise
something of the nature of choice. But there is no machine so capricious
as the human mind. The great poet who wrote those beautiful verses could
not do _that_ every day. A good deal more of what he writes is poor
enough; and many days he could not write at all. By long habit the mind
may be made capable of being put in harness daily for the humbler task
of producing prose; but you cannot say, when you harness it in the
morning, how far or at what rate it will run that day.

Go and see a great organ of which you have been told. Touch it, and you
hear the noble tones at once. The organ can produce them at any time.
But go and see a great man; touch _him_,--that is, get him to begin to
talk. You will be much disappointed, if you expect, certainly, to hear
anything like his book or his poem. A great man is not a man who is
always saying great things, or who is always able to say great things.
He is a man who on a few occasions has said great things; who on the
coming of a sufficient occasion may possibly say great things again;
but the staple of his talk is commonplace enough. Here is a point of
difference from machinery, with all machinery's apparent caprice. You
could not say, as you pointed to a steam-engine, "The usual power of
that engine is two hundred horses; but once or twice it has surprised us
all by working up to two thousand." No; the engine is always of nearly
the power of two thousand horses, if it ever is. But what we have been
supposing as to the engine is just what many men have done. Poe wrote
"The Raven"; he was working then up to two thousand horse power. But
he wrote abundance of poor stuff, working at about twenty-five. Read
straight through the volumes of Wordsworth, and I think you will find
traces of the engine having worked at many different powers, varying
from twenty-five horses or less up two thousand or more. Go and hear a
really great preacher, when he is preaching in his own church upon a
common Sunday, and possibly you may hear a very ordinary sermon. I have
heard Mr. Melvill preach very poorly. Yo