of life, the sensitiveness of the engraver has been
continually fostered and increased. An ugly picture was torture to his
cultivated eye, and he had to bear the torture all day long, like the
pain of an irritating disease.

Still even the line-engraver has secret sources of entertainment to
relieve the mortal tedium of his task-work. The picture may be hideous,
but the engraver has hidden consolations in the exercise of his
wonderful art. He can at least entertain himself with feats of
interpretative skill, with the gentle treacheries of improving here and
there upon the hatefulness of the intolerable original. He may
congratulate himself in the evening, that one more frightful hat or coat
has been got rid of; that the tiresome task has been reduced by a space
measurable in eights of an inch. The heaviest work which shows progress
is not without _one_ element of cheerfulness.

There is a great deal of intellectual labor, undergone simply for
discipline, which shows no present result that is appreciable, and which
therefore requires, in addition to patience and humility, one of the
noblest of the moral virtues, faith. Of all the toils in which men
engage, none are nobler in their origin or their aim than those by which
they endeavor to become more wise. Pray observe that whenever the desire
for greater wisdom is earnest enough to sustain men in these high
endeavors, there must be both humility and faith--the humility which
acknowledges present insufficiency, the faith that relies upon the
mysterious laws which govern our intellectual being. Be sure that there
has been great moral strength in all who have come to intellectual
greatness. During some brief moments of insight the mist has rolled away
and they have beheld, like a celestial city, the home of their highest
aspirations; but the cloud has gathered round them again, and still in
the gloom they have gone steadily forwards, stumbling often, yet
maintaining their unconquerable resolution. It is to this sublime
persistence of the intellectual in other ages that the world owes the
treasures which they won; it is by a like persistence that we may hope
to hand them down, augmented, to the future. Their intellectual purposes
did not weaken their moral nature, but exercised and exalted it. All
that was best and highest in the imperfect moral nature of Giordano
Bruno had its source in that noble passion for Philosophy, which made
him declare that for her sake it was easy