GENIUS AND SUICIDE. 369 



mental disease called genius ; Pascal says that extreme mind is 

 akin to extreme madness ; and everybody is familiar with Dry- 

 den's couplet : 



" Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 

 And thin partitions do their bounds divide." 



This is not a pleasant theory I will admit, but, as Lombroso says, 

 does not the botanist find the same thing ; and " has not Nature 

 caused to grow from the same germs and on the same clod of 

 earth the nettle and the jasmine, the aconite and the rose " ? 



But even though this view be not fully accepted, if we take 

 into consideration the fact that the poet lives in an ideal world 

 surrounded by creatures of his own imagination, to whom he 

 attributes the most exaggerated sentiments, it seems to me rea- 

 sonable to believe that sooner or later unhealthy introspection 

 must be awakened and followed, not infrequently, by the devel- 

 opment of morbid tendencies. 



But, above all else, it is my belief that a lack of proper train- 

 ing in the early years of life was at the bottom of the unhappi- 

 ness and mistakes in nearly all the cases mentioned. In the lives 

 of Chatterton, Miller, Tannahill, and Realf, the ones which we 

 have the most closely analyzed, we find a similarity of conditions 

 truly remarkable. Each was born to poverty of the direst kind, 

 each had but little systematic training, and each drifted about 

 upon the sea of knowledge until stranded upon its shoals. If 

 these unhappy lives teach us anything, they certainly show the 

 necessity of guiding with the utmost care the physical, the moral, 

 and the intellectual course of the erratic child of genius. The 

 precocious child especially should receive our most careful atten- 

 tion, for there is more than a grain of truth in the old adage that 

 "genius at five is madness at fifteen." I am myself convinced 

 that precocity is quite as often an indication of morbidity as it is 

 of genius. In rare instances it fulfills its promises, but it only does 

 so when the overactive and unequally developed brain receives 

 proper nourishment and judicious exercise. If the early training 

 be wrong, disappointment is sure to result, and " the huddled 

 knowledge," as Disraeli says, "like corn neglected in a well- 

 stored granary, perishes in its own masses." 



According to Prof. W. M. Ramsay, a religious veneration, persistently at- 

 tached to particular localities, has continued in Asia Minor through all changes in 

 the dominant religion of the country. Modern Turkish survivals of old religious 

 ideas constantly impress the traveler. They are apparent chiefly in the sanctity 

 of particular spots. The sanctity is usually transferred from its original bearer to 

 some Mohammedan or Turkish personage ; or else there is a dede, or nameless he- 

 roic ancestor. 



vol. xlii. — 25 



