h or
grace. He is conscious of this too,--but it is cruel to go on with this
sketch. You can see at once the kind of person who, whether he inspire
affection or dislike, cannot fail to create an interest, painful but
compassionate.

You will be pleased to hear that Dr. C. considers my health so improved
that I may next year enter fairly on the profession for which I was
intended and trained. Yet I still feel hesitating and doubtful. To
give myself wholly up to the art in which I am told I could excel must
alienate me entirely from the ambition that yearns for fields in
which, alas! it may perhaps never appropriate to itself a rood for
culture,--only wander, lost in a vague fairyland, to which it has not
the fairy's birthright. O thou great Enchantress, to whom are equally
subject the streets of Paris and the realm of Faerie, thou who hast
sounded to the deeps that circumfluent ocean called "practical human
life," and hast taught the acutest of its navigators to consider how far
its courses are guided by orbs in heaven,--canst thou solve this riddle
which, if it perplexes me, must perplex so many? What is the real
distinction between the rare genius and the commonalty of human souls
that feel to the quick all the grandest and divinest things which the
rare genius places before them, sighing within themselves, "This rare
genius does but express that which was previously familiar to us, so
far as thought and sentiment extend"? Nay, the genius itself, however
eloquent, never does, never can, express the whole of the thought or the
sentiment it interprets; on the contrary, the greater the genius is, the
more it leaves a something of incomplete satisfaction on our minds,--it
promises so much more than it performs; it implies so much more than
it announces. I am impressed with the truth of what I thus say in
proportion as I re-peruse and re-study the greatest writers that have
come within my narrow range of reading; and by the greatest writers I
mean those who are not exclusively reasoners (of such I cannot judge),
nor mere poets (of whom, so far as concerns the union of words with
music, I ought to be able to judge), but the few who unite reason and
poetry, and appeal at once to the common-sense of the multitude and
the imagination of the few. The highest type of this union to me is
Shakspeare; and I can comprehend the justice of no criticism on him
which does not allow this sense of incomplete satisfaction augmenting
in pro