hion is no longer fashionable, and the sportsman can no longer
stride over the ploughed fields. The old age of the Major Pendennises is
assuredly not to be envied: but how rich is the age of the Hunboldts! I
compare the life of the intellectual to a long wedge of gold--the thin
end of it begins at birth, and the depth and value of it go on
indefinitely increasing till at last comes Death (a personage for whom
Nathaniel Hawthorne had a peculiar dislike, for his unmannerly habit of
interruption), who stops the auriferous processes. Oh, the mystery of
the nameless ones who have died when the wedge was thin and looked so
poor and light! Oh, the happiness of the fortunate old men whose
thoughts went deeper and deeper like a wall that runs out into the sea!

NOTE.--One of the most painful cases of interruption caused by death
is that of Cuvier. His paralysis came upon him whilst he was still in
full activity, and death prevented him from arranging a great
accumulation of scientific material. He said to M. Pasquier, "I had
great things still to do; all was ready in my head. After thirty years
of labor and research, there remained but to write, and now the hands
fail, and carry with them the head." But the most lamentable instances
of this kind of interruption are, from the nature of things, unknown
to us. Even the friends of the deceased cannot estimate the extent of
the loss, for a man's immediate neighbors are generally the very last
persons to become aware of the nature of his powers or the value of
his acquirements.

PART II.

THE MORAL BASIS.

LETTER I.

TO A MORALIST WHO HAD SAID THAT THERE WAS A WANT OF MORAL FIBRE IN THE
INTELLECTUAL, ESPECIALLY IN POETS AND ARTISTS.

The love of intellectual pleasure--The seeking for a
stimulus--Intoxication of poetry and oratory--Other mental
intoxications--The Bishop of Exeter on drudgery--The labor of
composition in poetry--Wordsworth's dread of it--Moore--His trouble
with "Lalla Rookh"--His painstaking in preparation--Necessity of
patient industry in other arts--John Lewis, Meissonier,
Mulready--Drudgery in struggling against technical
difficulties--Water-color painting, etching, oil-painting, fresco,
line-engraving--Labor undergone for mere discipline--Moral strength of
students--Giordano Bruno.

You told me the other day that you believed the inducement to what I
called intellectual living to be merely the love of pl