had softened the face of that tranquil Nature from which he must
soon now pass out of reach and sight. On the tree of Time he was a leaf
already sear upon the bough--not an inscription graven into the rind.

Ever slow to yield to weak regrets--ever seeking to combat his own
enemies within--Darrell said to himself one night, while Fairthorn's
flute was breathing an air of romance through the melancholy walls: "Is
it too late yet to employ this still busy brain upon works that will
live when I am dust, and make Posterity supply the heir that fails to my
house?"

He shut himself up with immortal authors--he meditated on the choice of
a theme; his knowledge was wide, his taste refined;--words!--he could
not want words! Why should he not write? Alas; why indeed?--He who has
never been a writer in his youth, can no more be a writer in his age
than he can be a painter--a musician. What! not write a book! Oh,
yes--as he may paint a picture or set a song. But a writer, in the
emphatic sense of the word--a writer as Darrell was an orator--oh,
no! And, least of all, will he be a writer if he has been an orator
by impulse and habit--an orator too happily gifted to require, and
too laboriously occupied to resort to, the tedious aids of written
preparation--an orator as modern life forms orators--not, of course, an
orator like those of the classic world, who elaborated sentences
before delivery, and who, after delivery, polished each extemporaneous
interlude into rhetorical exactitude and musical perfection. And how
narrow the range of compositions to a man burdened already by a grave
reputation! He cannot have the self-abandonment--he cannot venture the
headlong charge--with which Youth flings the reins to genius, and dashes
into the ranks of Fame. Few and austere his themes--fastidious and
hesitating his taste. Restricted are the movements of him who walks
for the first time into the Forum of Letters with the purple hem on his
senatorial toga. Guy Darrell, at his age, entering among authors as
a novice!--he, the great lawyer, to whom attorneys would have sent no
briefs had he been suspected of coquetting with a muse,--he, the great
orator who had electrified audiences in proportion to the sudden effects
which distinguish oral inspiration from written eloquence--he achieve
now, in an art which his whole life had neglected, any success
commensurate to his contemporaneous repute;--how unlikely! But a success
which should outlive that