being
done by genius.

The greatest geniuses have been the greatest workers. Sheridan was
considered a genius, but it was found that the "brilliants" and
"off-hand sayings" with which he used to dazzle the House of Commons
were elaborated, polished and repolished, and put down in his
memorandum book ready for any emergency.

Genius has been well defined as the infinite capacity for taking pains.
If men who have done great things could only reveal to the struggling
youth of to-day how much of their reputations was due to downright hard
digging and plodding, what an uplift of inspiration and encouragement
they would give. How often I have wished that the discouraged,
struggling youth could know of the heart-aches, the head-aches, the
nerve-aches, the disheartening trials, the discouraged hours, the fears
and despair involved in works which have gained the admiration of the
world, but which have taxed the utmost powers of their authors. You
can read in a few minutes or a few hours a poem or a book with only
pleasure and delight, but the days and months of weary plodding over
details and dreary drudgery often required to produce it would stagger
belief.

The greatest works in literature have been elaborated and elaborated,
line by line, paragraph by paragraph, often rewritten a dozen times.
The drudgery which literary men have put into the productions which
have stood the test of time is almost incredible. Lucretius worked
nearly a lifetime on one poem. It completely absorbed his life. It is
said that Bryant rewrote "Thanatopsis" a hundred times, and even then
was not satisfied with it. John Foster would sometimes linger a week
over a single sentence. He would hack, split, prune, pull up by the
roots, or practice any other severity on whatever he wrote, till it
gained his consent to exist. Chalmers was once asked what Foster was
about in London. "Hard at it," he replied, "at the rate of a line a
week." Dickens, one of the greatest writers of modern fiction, was so
worn down by hard work that he looked as "haggard as a murderer." Even
Lord Bacon, one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived, left large
numbers of MSS. filled with "sudden thoughts set down for use." Hume
toiled thirteen hours a day on his "History of England." Lord Eldon
astonished the world with his great legal learning, but when he was a
student too poor to buy books, he had actually borrowed and copied many
hundreds of pages of large law