sky, spring toward the light of favor of its own accord? That he who is conscious of his own acquirements, desires the fame of possessing them, hath been proverbial since the time of Persius, and in my day"—
"Pardon me, oh learned phantom, in thy in thy day pedantry was not the bug-bear which it now is; though even then, genius was held synonimous with folly, and to be suspected of being a poet did as now seriously affect one's success in any respectable business. But whether it is owing to these considerations, or others that may be mentioned, it is only by some extraordinary powers of quest and inquisition, that we can find out people among whom we are daily and hourly conversant. We meet in the busy and in the gay world upon such common-place grounds—we have so many matters of fact or indifferent nothings, which, according to the requisitions of society must be more or less discussed, that the brief moments pass in the interchange of conversational currency, while our real coin grows rusty in our pockets. And yet among the cultivated classes there are unsuspected powers, in the recesses, in the eddies of our society, which might be gathered to a mighty stream that should tend with a general effect toward a general object, and should attain it in the general discovery and consequent increase of its own effective energies."
"Thou speakest, my son, under the influence of vivid feelings and flattering hopes and prospects. Much doth it fear me lest thou confidest too much in these hidden and uncertain resources. Bethink thee, should they fail, where but upon thy rash head will the blame and the burthen fall. Abandon then thy design, while there is time to avail thyself of the counsel conveyed in the Chinese proverb—'it is easier to mount a tiger than to get off his back when once seated.'"
"Allow us to think otherwise and to indulge the belief, that if we do our part, 'the blame,' in case of failure, will only, among fair-judging people, fall where it is justly due. And for 'the burthen,' as we sanguinely think it will, so do we know that it must, be divided by others. The time has long gone by, at least in the civilized world, when the might of one man's hand could govern, or the abundance of one man's intellect could nourish the strength and thoughts of many. Literature is tending like civil polity to republicanism and distribution: to a distribution which enriches the many without impoverishing the few, but which makes the conferring of acceptable gifts on the former hourly more difficult; for though the
