ifts serves as a
conduit for this flowing significance may indeed toil as no drudge ever
did or can, yet with such geniality and success, that he shall feel of
his toil only the joy, and that we shall see of it only the prosperity.
A swan labors in swimming, a pigeon in his flight; yet as no part
of this industry is defeated, as it issues momentarily in perfect
achievement, it makes upon us the impression, not of the limitation of
labor, but of the freedom and liberation of an animal genius.

"Long deliberations," says Goethe, "commonly indicate that we have not
the point to be determined clearly in view." So an extreme sense
of striving effort, or, in other words, an extreme sense of inward
hindrance, in the performance of a high task, usually denotes the
presence in us of an element irrelevant to our work, and perhaps
unfriendly to it. If a stream flow roughly, you infer obstructions in
the channel. Often the explanation may be that one is attempting to-day
a task proper to some future time,--to another year, or another
century. It is the green fruit that clings tenaciously to the bough; the
ripe falls of itself.

But as blighted and worm-eaten apples likewise fall of themselves, so in
this ease of execution the falsest work may agree with the best. That
the similarity is purely specious needs not be urged; yet in practically
distinguishing between the two there are not a few that fail. The most
precious work is performed with a noble, though not idle ease, because
it is the sincere, seasonable, and, as it were, inevitable flowering
into expression of one's inward life; and work utterly, glibly insincere
and imitative is often done with ease, because it is so successfully
separated from the inward life as not even to recognize its claim.
Accordingly, pure art and pure artifice, sincere creation and sheer
fabrication, flow; from the mixture of these, or from any mixture of
natural and necessary with factitious expression, comes embarrassment.
In the mastery of life, or of death, there is peace; the intermediate
state, that of sickness, is full of pain and struggle. In Homer and
in Tupper, in Cicero and the leaders of the London "Times," in Jeremy
Taylor and the latest Reverend Mr. Orotund, you find a liberal and
privileged utterance; but honest John Foster, made of powerful, but
ill-composed elements, and replete with an intelligence now gleaming and
now murky, could wring statements from his mind only as testimony in