repute, win the "everlasting inheritance"
which could alone have nerved him to adequate effort--how impossible!
He could not himself comprehend why, never at a loss for language
felicitously opposite or richly ornate when it had but to flow from his
thought to his tongue, nor wanting ease, even eloquence, in epistolary
correspondence confidentially familiar--he should find words fail ideas,
and ideas fail words, the moment his pen became a wand that conjured up
the Ghost of the dread Public! The more copious his thoughts, the more
embarrassing their selection; the more exquisite his perception of
excellence in others, the more timidly frigid his efforts at faultless
style. It would be the same with the most skilful author, if the Ghost
of the Public had not long since ceased to haunt him. While he writes,
the true author's solitude is absolute or peopled at his will. But
take an audience from an orator, what is he? He commands the living
public--the Ghost of the Public awes himself.

"Surely once," sighed Darrell, as he gave his blurred pages to the
flames--"surely once I had some pittance of the author's talent, and
have spent it upon lawsuits!"

The author's talent, no doubt, Guy Darrell once had--the author's
temperament never. What is the author's temperament? Too long a task to
define. But without it a man may write a clever book, a useful book, a
book that may live a year, ten years, fifty years. He will not stand
out to distant ages a representative of the age that rather lived in
him than he in it. The author's temperament is that which makes him an
integral, earnest, original unity, distinct from all before and all
that may succeed him. And as a Father of the Church has said that
the consciousness of individual being is the sign of immortality,
not granted to the inferior creatures--so it is in this individual
temperament one and indivisible, and in the intense conviction of it,
more than in all the works it may throw off, that the author becomes
immortal. Nay, his works may perish like those of Orpheus or Pythagoras;
but he himself, in his name, in the footprint of his being, remains,
like Orpheus or Pythagoras, undestroyed, indestructible.

Resigning literature, the Solitary returned to Science. There he was
more at home. He had cultivated science, in his dazzling academical
career, with ardour and success; he had renewed the study, on his first
retirement to Fawley, as a distraction from tormenting memori