rward he
deliberately fits two lenses in a leaden tube, the moon's mountains,
Jupiter's satellites, and Saturn's rings are all waiting to catch his
eye. A thoughtful meditation on the spasms of a dead frog's leg in
Bologna becomes galvanic. The gas breaking on the surface of a brewery
vat, well watched by Priestley, bursts forth into pneumatic chemistry.
A spider's web in the Duke of Devonshire's garden expands in the mind
of my lord's gardener, Brown, into a suspension bridge. A sledge
hammer, well swung in Cromarty, opened those New Walks in an Old
Field. The diffraction of light revealed itself to Young in the hues
of a soap-bubble. As the genie of the oriental tale unfolded his huge
height from the bottle stamped with Solomon's seal, so the career of
Davy first evolved itself out of old vials and gallipots. When the boy
Bowditch was found in all his leisure moments snatching up his slate
and pencil, when Cobbett grappled resolutely with the grammar, when
Cuvier dissected the cuttlefish found upon the shore, or Scott was
seen sitting on a ladder, hour after hour, poring over books, they
will be further heard from.

"If such instances illustrate the propulsive force of native genius,
they also indicate what training must do when the impulsive genius is
not there. No idler plea was ever entered for an idler than when he
says,--'I have no bent for this, no interest in that, and no genius
for the other.' The animal has his _habitat_, and stays fast. A
complete man is intellectually and physically a cosmopolite. Till he
has gained the power to throw his will-force wherever the work summons
him, most of all to the weak points of his condition, till he has
learned to be his own task-master and overseer, he is but a 'slave of
the ring.'

"In most lines the highest gift is the gift of toil. Indeed, men of
genius have often been the most terrible of toilers, and in the
regions of highest art. How have the great masters of music first
welded the keys of the organ and harpsichord to their fingers' ends
and their souls' nerves before they poured forth the Creation or the
Messiah, the symphonies and sonatas! Think of Meyerbeer and his
fifteen hours of daily work; of Mozart's incessant study of the
masters, and his own eight hundred compositions in his short life; of
Mendelssohn's nine years elaboration of Elijah. Or in the sister art,
how we track laborious, continuous study in the Peruginesque, the
Florentine, and the Roman st