which prepared them
for the labor of their manhood. It may be a pure assumption to say this,
but the assumption is confirmed by every instance that is known to me.
Many eminent men have undergone the discipline of business, many like
Franklin have been self-disciplined, but I have never heard of a person
who had risen to intellectual eminence without voluntary submission to
an intellectual discipline of some kind.

There are, no doubt, great pleasures attached to the intellectual life,
and quite peculiar to it; but these pleasures are the support of
discipline and not its negation. They give us the cheerfulness necessary
for our work, but they do not excuse us from the work. They are like
the cup of coffee served to a soldier on duty, not like the opium which
incapacitates for everything but dreaming.

I have been led into these observations by a perusal of the new book
which you sent me. It has many qualities which in a young writer are
full of promise. It is earnest, and lively, and exuberant, but at the
same time it is undisciplined.

Now I believe it may be affirmed, that although there has been much
literature in former ages which was both vigorous and undisciplined,
still when an age presents, as ours does, living examples of perfect
intellectual discipline, whoever falls below them in this respect
contents himself with the very kind of inferiority which of all
inferiorities is the easiest to avoid. You cannot, by an effort of the
will, hope to rival the brilliance of a genius, but you may quite
reasonably expect to obtain as complete a control over your own
faculties and your own work as any other highly-cultivated person.

The origin of discipline is the desire to do not merely our best with
the degree of power and knowledge which at the time we do actually
happen to possess, but with that which we _might_ possess if we
submitted to the necessary training. The powers given to us by Nature
are little more than a power to become, and this becoming is always
conditional on some sort of exercise--what sort we have to discover for
ourselves.

No class of persons are so liable to overlook the uses of discipline as
authors are. Anybody can write a book, though few can write that which
deserves the name of literature. There are great technical differences
between literature and book-making, but few can clearly explain these
differences, or detect, in their own case, the absence of the necessary
qualities. In paint