been lost in the tea-trade, how many dramatists (though
the age of the drama has passed) have wasted their genius in great
mercantile and mechanical enterprises. I know a man who might have been
the poet, the essayist, perhaps the critic, of this country, who chose
to become a country judge, to sit day after day upon a bench in
an obscure corner of the world, listening to wrangling lawyers and
prevaricating witnesses, preferring to judge his fellow-men rather than
enlighten them.

It is fortunate for the vanity of the living and the reputation of the
dead, that men get almost as much credit for what they do not as for
what they do. It was the opinion of many that Burns might have excelled
as a statesman, or have been a great captain in war; and Mr. Carlyle
says that if he had been sent to a university, and become a trained
intellectual workman, it lay in him to have changed the whole course of
British literature! A large undertaking, as so vigorous and dazzling a
writer as Mr. Carlyle must know by this time, since British
literature has swept by him in a resistless and widening flood, mainly
uncontaminated, and leaving his grotesque contrivances wrecked on the
shore with other curiosities of letters, and yet among the richest of
all the treasures lying there.

It is a temptation to a temperate man to become a sot, to hear what
talent, what versatility, what genius, is almost always attributed to a
moderately bright man who is habitually drunk. Such a mechanic, such a
mathematician, such a poet he would be, if he were only sober; and
then he is sure to be the most generous, magnanimous, friendly soul,
conscientiously honorable, if he were not so conscientiously drunk. I
suppose it is now notorious that the most brilliant and promising men
have been lost to the world in this way. It is sometimes almost painful
to think what a surplus of talent and genius there would be in the world
if the habit of intoxication should suddenly cease; and what a slim
chance there would be for the plodding people who have always had
tolerably good habits. The fear is only mitigated by the observation
that the reputation of a person for great talent sometimes ceases with
his reformation.

It is believed by some that the maidens who would make the best wives
never marry, but remain free to bless the world with their impartial
sweetness, and make it generally habitable. This is one of the mysteries
of Providence and New England life. It see