e had
no profession his leisure was unlimited, and he employed it in educating
himself without any other purpose than this, the highest purpose of all,
to become a cultivated man. The very prevalent idea that lives of this
kind are failures unless they leave some visible achievement as a
testimony and justification of their labors, is based upon a narrow
conception both of duty and of utility. Men of this unproductive class
are sure to influence their immediate neighborhood by the example of
their life. Isolated as they are too frequently in the provinces, in the
midst of populations destitute of the higher culture, they often
establish the notion of it notwithstanding the contemptuous estimates of
the practical people around them. A single intellectual life, thus
modestly lived through in the obscurity of a country-town, may leave a
tradition and become an enduring influence. In this, as in all things,
let us trust the arrangements of Nature. If men are at the same time
constitutionally studious and constitutionally unproductive, in must be
that production is not the only use of study. Joubert was right in
keeping silence when he felt no impulses to speak, right also in saying
the little that he did say without a superfluous word. His mind is more
fully known, and more influential, than many which are abundantly
productive.

LETTER V.

TO A STUDENT WHO FELT HURRIED AND DRIVEN.

Some intellectual products possible only in excitement--Byron's
authority on the subject--Can inventive minds work regularly?--Sir
Walter Scott's opinion--Napoleon on the winning of victories--The
prosaic business of men of genius--"Waiting for
inspiration"--Rembrandt's advice to a young painter--Culture necessary
to inspiration itself--Byron, Keats, Morris--Men of genius may be
regular as students.

In my last letter to you on quiet regularity of work, I did not give
much consideration to another matter which, in certain kinds of work,
has to be taken into account, for I preferred to make that the subject
of a separate letter. There are certain intellectual products which are
only possible in hours or minutes of great cerebral excitement. Byron
said that when people were surprised to find poets very much like others
in the ordinary intercourse of life, their surprise was due to ignorance
of this. If people knew, Byron said, that poetical production came from
an excitement which from its intensity could only be temporary, th