not beauty that he loves,
nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and his
sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the variety
of human fate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all
that is not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears a face
of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if there
be any exception--and here destiny steps in--it is in those moments
when, wearied or surfeited of the primary activity of the senses, he
calls up before memory the image of transacted pains and pleasures. Thus
it is that such an one shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and
inclines insensibly toward that career of art which consists only in the
tasting and recording of experience.

This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of all
other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and, so existing, it will
pass gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, it is not to be
regarded; it is not a vocation, but a temptation; and when your father
the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so properly discouraged your
ambition, he was recalling not improbably some similar passage in his
own experience. For the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the
vocation is rare. But again we have vocations which are imperfect; we
have men whose minds are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the
general _ars artium_ and common base of all creative work; who will now
dip into painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing
a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with genuine
knowledge. And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult
to speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, for in
literature (which drags with so wide a net) all his information may be
found some day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun, and turn
at last into the critic, he will have learned to use the necessary
tools. Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and
precise; to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion
of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just
as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or
the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a
man love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of success or
fame, the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation