sort of personage.
Frank, although as noble a fellow as ever sat a horse, is yet--you
cannot help thinking--very ignorant of Euripides; even the English
master at Dr. Bidlow's school, you feel sure, would balk at a dozen
problems you could give him.

You get an exalted idea of that uncertain quality which turns the heads
of a vast many of your fellows, called--Genius. An odd notion seems to
be inherent in the atmosphere of those college chambers, that there is a
certain faculty of mind--first developed, as would seem, in
colleges--which accomplishes whatever it chooses without any special
painstaking. For a time you fall yourself into this very unfortunate
hallucination; you cultivate it after the usual college fashion, by
drinking a vast deal of strong coffee and whiskey-toddy, by writing a
little poor verse in the Byronic temper, and by studying very late at
night with closed blinds.

It costs you however more anxiety and hypocrisy than you could possibly
have believed.

----You will learn, Clarence, when the Autumn has rounded your hopeful
Summer, if not before, that there is no Genius in life like the Genius
of energy and industry. You will learn, that all the traditions so
current among very young men that certain great characters have wrought
their greatness by an inspiration, as it were, grow out of a sad
mistake.

And you will further find, when you come to measure yourself with men,
that there are no rivals so formidable as those earnest, determined
minds which reckon the value of every hour, and which achieve eminence
by persistent application.

Literary ambition may inflame you at certain periods and a thought of
some great names will flash like a spark into the mine of your purposes;
you dream till midnight over books; you set up shadows, and chase them
down,--other shadows, and they fly. Dreaming will never catch them.
Nothing makes the "scent lie well" in the hunt after distinction, but
labor.

And it is a glorious thing, when once you are weary of the dissipation,
and the _ennui_ of your own aimless thought, to take up some glowing
page of an earnest thinker, and read--deep and long, until you feel the
metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your
flinty lethargy flashes of ideas that give the mind light and heat. And
away you go in the chase of what the soul within is creating on the
instant, and you wonder at the fecundity of what seemed so barren, and
at the ripeness