e, has
given Great Britain an additional productive power equal to ten millions
of workmen, at the cost of only a halfpenny a day,--an invention which
supplies the motive power by which a single county in England is enabled
to produce fabrics representing the labor of twenty-one millions of
men,--an invention which, combined with others, annually, in England,
weaves into cloth a length of cotton thread equal to fifty-one times the
distance between the earth and the sun, five thousand millions of
miles,--an invention which created the wealth by which England was
enabled to fight or subsidize the whole continent of Europe from 1793 to
1815, and which made that long war really a contest between the despotic
power of Napoleon Bonaparte and the productive genius of James Watt. All
this vast and teeming future was hidden from the good grandmother, as
she saw the boy idling over the teakettle. "James," she said, "I never
saw such an idle young fellow as you are. Do take a book and employ
yourself usefully. For the last half-hour you have not spoken a single
word. Do you know what you have been doing all this time? Why, you have
taken off, and replaced, and taken off again, the tea-pot lid, and you
have held alternately in the steam, first a saucer and then a spoon; and
you have busied yourself in examining and collecting together the little
drops formed by the condensation of the steam on the surface of the
china and the silver. Now are you not ashamed to waste your time in this
disgraceful manner?" Was ever idleness so productive before?

If we turn from intellectual powers to sentiments, which are the soul of
powers, we shall find renewed proofs that the spirit which animates the
kingdoms of mind is the youthful spirit of health and hope and energy
and cheer. In the regretful tenderness with which all great thinkers
have looked back upon their youth do not we detect the source of their
most kindling inspirations? Time may have impaired their energies,
clipped their aspirations, deadened their faith; but there, away off in
the past, is the gladdening vision of their youthful years; there the
joyous tumult of impulses and aims; there the grand and generous
affections; there the sweet surprise of swift-springing thoughts from
never-failing fountains; there the pure love of truth and beauty which
sent their minds speeding out beyond the limits of positive knowledge;
and there the thrills of ecstasy as new worlds opened on their v