er the poor man is at the top, the rich man
underneath. You start in the attic and work your way down to the first
floor.

A good many great men have lived in attics and some have died there.
Attics, says the dictionary, are "places where lumber is stored," and
the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one
time or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, its deep-browed
men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will tell truths
that no one wants to hear--these are the lumber that the world hides
away in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic and Chatterton starved in
one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets. Faraday and De Quincey knew
them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully in them, sleeping soundly--too
soundly sometimes--upon their trundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier
of fortune that he was, inured to hardship and all careless of himself.
Dickens spent his youth among them, Morland his old age--alas! a
drunken, premature old age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his
sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins
leaned his head upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin;
Savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer
bed than a doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the
engineer--the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were
reared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius.

No one who honors the aristocracy of mind can feel ashamed of
acquaintanceship with them. Their damp-stained walls are sacred to
the memory of noble names. If all the wisdom of the world and all its
art--all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it
has snatched from heaven--were gathered together and divided into heaps,
and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths were
flashed forth in the brilliant _salon_ amid the ripple of light laughter
and the sparkle of bright eyes; and this deep knowledge was dug up in
the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely down on the
leather-scented shelves; and this heap belongs to the crowded street;
and that to the daisied field--the heap that would tower up high above
the rest as a mountain above hills would be the one at which we should
look up and say: this noblest pile of all--these glorious paintings and
this wondrous music, these trumpet words, these solemn thoughts, these
daring deeds, they were