availed him, or would they ever have come to him at all? If they had
come to him, they would have revealed only the extent of his own
negligence. Instead of showing him _what to do_, they would have made
painfully evident what _ought to have been done_. But it is more
probable that these clear moments would never have occurred to a mind
unprepared by study. Clear military inspirations never occur to
shopkeepers and farmers, as bright ideas about checkmates occur only to
persons who have studied chess. The prosaic business, then, of the man
of genius is to accumulate that preparatory knowledge without which his
genius can never be available, and he can do work of this kind as
regularly as he likes.

The one fatal mistake which is committed habitually by people who have
the scarcely desirable gift of half-genius is "waiting for inspiration."
They pass week after week in a state of indolence, unprofitable alike to
the mind and the purse, under pretext of waiting for intellectual
flashes like those which came to Napoleon on his battle-fields. They
ought to remember the advice given by one of the greatest artists of the
seventeenth century to a young painter of his acquaintance. "Practise
assiduously what you already know, and in course of time other things
will become clear to you." The inspirations come only to the
disciplined; the indolent wait for them in vain.

If you have genius, therefore, or believe you have, it is admitted that
you cannot be perpetually in a state of intense excitement. If you were
in that state without ceasing, you would go mad. You cannot be expected
to write poetry in the plodding ox-pace manner advocated for
intellectual work generally in my last letter. As for that good old
comparison between the hare and the tortoise, it may be answered for
you, simply, that you are not a tortoise, and that what is a most wise
procedure for tortoises may be impracticable for you. The actual
composition of poetry, especially poetry of a fiery kind, like--

"The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece,"

of Byron, is to be done not when the poet will, but when he can, or
rather, when he _must_.

But if you are a wise genius you will feel how necessary is culture even
for work of that kind. Byron would not have felt any enthusiasm for the
isles of Greece if he had not known something of their history. The
verses are an inspiration, but they could never have occurred to a quite
uncultivated person, however br