result. Ingres used
to counsel his pupils to sketch always, to sketch upon and within the
first sketch till the picture came right in the end; and this was
strictly Balzac's method in literature. The literary and artistic labors
of these two men did not proceed so much upon the principle of
travelling as upon that of cultivation. They took an idea in the rough,
as a settler takes a tract from wild nature, and then they went over it
repeatedly, each time pushing the cultivation of it a little farther.
Scott, Horace Vernet, John Phillip, and many others, have worked rather
on the principle of travelling, passing over the ground once, and
leaving it, never coming back again to correct the mistakes of
yesterday. Both methods of work require deliberation, but the latter
needs it in the supreme degree. All very decided workers, men who did
not correct, have been at the same time very deliberate workers--rapid,
in the sense of accomplishing much in the course of the year, or the
life, but cautious and slow and observant whilst they actually labored,
thinking out very carefully every sentence before they wrote it, every
touch of paint before they laid it.

LETTER II.

TO A STUDENT IN THE FIRST ARDOR OF INTELLECTUAL AMBITION.

The first freshness--Why should it not be preserved?--The dulness of
the intellectual--Fictions and false promises--Ennui in work
itself--Duerer's engraving of Melancholy--Scott about Dryden--Byron,
Shelley, Wordsworth--Humboldt, Cuvier, Goethe--Tennyson's
"Maud"--Preventives of _ennui_--Hard study for limited times--The
_ennui_ of jaded faculties.

I have been thinking about you frequently of late, and the burden or
refrain of my thoughts has been "What a blessing he has in that first
freshness, if only he could keep it!" But now I am beginning more
hopefully to ask myself, "Why should he not keep it?"

It would be an experiment worth trying, so to order your intellectual
life, that however stony and thorny your path might be, however
difficult and arduous, it should at all events never be dull; or, to
express what I mean more accurately, that you yourself should never
feel the depressing influences of dulness during the years when they are
most to be dreaded. I want you to live steadily and happily in your
intellectual labors, even to the natural close of existence, and my best
wish for you is that you may escape a long and miserable malady which
brain-workers very commonly suffer fr