s social _gaucheries_, and walked miles and miles to
get the twitchings out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his
arms and shoulders. "God may forgive sins," he said, "but awkwardness
has no forgiveness in heaven or earth." He admired in Newton, not so
much his theory of the moon, as his letter to Collins, in which he
forbade him to insert his name with the solution of the problem in the
"Philosophical Transactions": "It would perhaps increase my
acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline."

These conversations led me somewhat later to the knowledge of similar
cases, existing elsewhere, and to the discovery that they are not of
very infrequent occurrence. Few substances are found pure in
nature. Those constitutions which can bear in open day the rough
dealing of the world must be of that mean and average structure,--such
as iron and salt, atmospheric air, and water. But there are metals,
like potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under
naphtha. Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a
culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in
royal chambers. Nature protects her own work. To the culture of the
world, an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards them by
a certain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing,
Port, and clubs, we should have had no "Theory of the Sphere," and no
"Principia." They had that necessity of isolation which genius
feels. Each must stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his
electricity. Even Swedenborg, whose theory of the universe is based on
affection, and who reprobates to weariness the danger and vice of pure
intellect, is constrained to make an extraordinary exception: "There
are also angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and
house; these dwell in the midst of heaven, because they are the best
of angels."

We have known many fine geniuses have that imperfection that they
cannot do anything useful, not so much as write one clean
sentence. 'Tis worse, and tragic, that no man is fit for society who
has fine traits. At a distance, he is admired; but bring him hand to
hand, he is a cripple. One protects himself by solitude, and one by
courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner,--each concealing how he
can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict
association. But there is no remedy that can reach the heart of the
disease, but either habits of self-re