GENIUS. FEW men think. Now and then there comes a masterspirit, who stirs the ocean to its depths, and scatters pebbles and stones in their native beauty over its shore. There are ever those who pick up these stones and polish them; and next summer they shall adorn the pleasure-seekers on a gala-day. But the man who, in Goldsmith's phrase, "toiled the dangerous deep," may have met with Jonah's disastrous fate, minus the prophet's deliverance, for all these pleasure-seekers know or care. Thus it ever is. Here and there may be a Nehemiah, who shakes off the shackles of a slave, proves himself a man, and is allowed by all to march foremost in the front rank of his contemporaries. But we know that palaces and temples are reared and cities fortified while he who founded them is tombed in oblivion. It is the course of nature. Aged people weep for the "good old times." The mature solve every problem by the rule of custom. Young men and ladies walk in the path chalked out for them by their grandfathers and grandmothers, whose organ of vision is rendered so defective by age, that the chalk mark is always crooked, and is a model of geometrical B |