speculation which is opened up by his words. I know, indeed,
that, in the hands of the Creator, each of us might have been made
a different man. The pounds of material which were fashioned into
Shakspeare might have made a bumpkin with little thought beyond pigs
and turnips, or, by some slight difference beyond man's skill to trace,
might have made an idiot. A little infusion of energy into the mental
constitution might have made the mild, pensive day-dreamer who is
wandering listlessly by the river-side, sometimes chancing upon noble
thoughts, which he does not carry out into action, and does not even
write down on paper, into an active worker, with Arnold's keen look, who
would have carved out a great career for himself, and exercised a real
influence over the views and conduct of numbers of other men. A very
little alteration in feature might have made a plain face into
a beautiful one; and some slight change in the position or the
contractibility of certain of the muscles might have made the most
awkward of manners and gaits into the most dignified and graceful. All
_that_ we all understand. But my present subject is the making which is
in circumstances after our natural disposition is fixed,--the training,
coming from a hundred quarters, which forms the material supplied by
Nature into the character which each of us actually bears. And setting
apart the case of great genius, whose bent towards the thing in which it
will excel is so strong that it will find its own field by inevitable
selection, and whose strength is such that no unfavorable circumstances
can hold it down, almost any ordinary human being may be formed into
almost any development. I know a huge massive beam of rough iron, which
supports a great weight. Whenever I pass it, I cannot help giving it a
pat with my hand, and saying to it, "You might have been hair-springs
for watches." I know an odd-looking little man attached to a certain
railway-station, whose business it is, when a train comes in, to go
round it with a large box of a yellow concoction and supply grease to
the wheels. I have often looked out of the carriage-window at that
odd little man and thought to myself, "Now you might have been a
chief-justice." And, indeed, I can say from personal observation that
the stuff ultimately converted into cabinet-ministers does not at an
early stage at all appreciably differ from that which never becomes more
than country-parsons. There is a great gulf b