684 ^^-^ POPULAR SCIUNCE MONTHLY. 



some sort of galvanic life ! In the higher provinces, too, your intel- 

 lectual men are distributed into departments and sub-departments as 

 writers or speakers, while life in the walks of fashion is a game of 

 consumption and show. And when on the part of busy men the day's 

 arduous endeavors toward the continuance of sublime human life are 

 accomplished, and leisure is left for reflection, then a glass of beer, a 

 pipe, cards, coffee and cake, a game at billiards or whist, a novel from 

 the circulating library, is illimitable scope for the spiritual faculties. 



And if we turn to our highest spiritual institutions we see equal 

 signs of prosperity. At all our famous universities droves of young 

 men called " students " are invited to profane the holiest names and 

 symbols under the pretext of studying them, as if the first and fore- 

 most condition to intellectual activity or " study" were not a certain 

 degree of spiritual faculty, of purification of the heart. The towns 

 where they are collected for spiritual culture they defile more scanda- 

 lously than any other class which makes no pretensions to spiritual 

 culture. 



Even if we single, out of the whole range of human history, the 

 few men of genius whom we are constrained to regard as the eminent- 

 ly favored and endowed of our race, we find what a broken career has 

 been allotted to the most of them. Have not many of them, possess- 

 ing courage to inspire, intelligence to enlighten, sensibility to refine 

 the world, sickened under the languor of neglect or got embittered at 

 the endless contradictions and misrepresentations of their fellows, dy- 

 ing at last as unfortunate men, unhappy to themselves, unbeneficial to 

 their contemporaries? What an evil is the not unfrequent depravity 

 of genius, and which under happier circumstances might have been a 

 great salutary influence instead ! Might not the tremendous forces of 

 Swift, for example, have been turned to better account than left to 

 explode in shocks of half diabolic hate in earlier days, and in madness 

 at the end ? Think of the generous human heart, brave will, and clear 

 head of Burns, a man of quite transcendent powers, yet fain to slink 

 past on the shady side of the street, left to bleed so Avretchedly to 

 death in the midsummer of his days. ContemiDlate the great intellect 

 and great heart of Lessing, a man of thrice excellent mother-wit and 

 eftectiveness, disposing with a lordly air of the whole literature of 

 Europe, awakening with his clarion-voice his slumbering nation to 

 new intellectual conquests, yet himself imprisoned for so many of his 

 best years in the stifling library-dust of Wolfenbtittel, isolated there 

 in the midst of an unhealthy swamp ; the world such a dish of skimmed 

 milk as to be incapable of any sense of honor. Was not Lessing's 

 child a boy of remarkable sense, who no sooner came into the world 

 than, seeing his mistake, made out of it double-quick ? Is it not prob- 

 able that many brave souls, braver and better perhaps than any known 

 to fame, have gone down to silence unregarded, the world's stupidity 

 being more than a match for the gods themselves ? Think of good 



