o with it?' But a
sculptor, now! That 's a pretty trade for a fellow who has got his
living to make and yet is so damnably constituted that he can't work to
order, and considers that, aesthetically, clock ornaments don't pay! You
can't model the serge-coated cypresses, nor those mouldering old Tritons
and all the sunny sadness of that dried-up fountain; you can't put the
light into marble--the lovely, caressing, consenting Italian light that
you get so much of for nothing. Say that a dozen times in his life a man
has a complete sculpturesque vision--a vision in which the imagination
recognizes a subject and the subject kindles the imagination. It is a
remunerative rate of work, and the intervals are comfortable!"

One morning, as the two young men were lounging on the sun-warmed
grass at the foot of one of the slanting pines of the Villa Mondragone,
Roderick delivered himself of a tissue of lugubrious speculations as to
the possible mischances of one's genius. "What if the watch should run
down," he asked, "and you should lose the key? What if you should wake
up some morning and find it stopped, inexorably, appallingly stopped?
Such things have been, and the poor devils to whom they happened have
had to grin and bear it. The whole matter of genius is a mystery. It
bloweth where it listeth and we know nothing of its mechanism. If it
gets out of order we can't mend it; if it breaks down altogether we
can't set it going again. We must let it choose its own pace, and hold
our breath lest it should lose its balance. It 's dealt out in different
doses, in big cups and little, and when you have consumed your portion
it 's as naif to ask for more as it was for Oliver Twist to ask for more
porridge. Lucky for you if you 've got one of the big cups; we drink
them down in the dark, and we can't tell their size until we tip them
up and hear the last gurgle. Those of some men last for life; those of
others for a couple of years. Nay, what are you smiling at so damnably?"
he went on. "Nothing is more common than for an artist who has set out
on his journey on a high-stepping horse to find himself all of a sudden
dismounted and invited to go his way on foot. You can number them by the
thousand--the people of two or three successes; the poor fellows whose
candle burnt out in a night. Some of them groped their way along without
it, some of them gave themselves up for blind and sat down by the
wayside to beg. Who shall say that I 'm not o