ods?
For his country's sake, that it may not lose the service he was born
capable of doing it; for his own sake, that his life be not choked and
perverted, and his light from Heaven be not changed into lightning
from the Other Place,--it is essential that there be such a career. The
country that can offer no career in that case, is a doomed country; nay
it is already a dead country: it has secured the ban of Heaven upon it;
will not have Heaven's light, will have the Other Place's lightning; and
may consider itself as appointed to expire, in frightful coughings of
street musketry or otherwise, on a set day, and to be in the eye of law
dead. In no country is there not some career, inviting to it either the
noble Hero, or the tough Greek of the Lower Empire: which of the two do
your careers invite? There is no question more important. The kind of
careers you offer in countries still living, determines with perfect
exactness the kind of the life that is in them,--whether it is natural
blessed life, or galvanic accursed ditto, and likewise what degree of
strength is in the same.

Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or
unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us;
and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions,
Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church.
Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he
can hold his tongue or cannot? True, all human talent, especially all
deep talent, is a talent to _do_, and is intrinsically of silent nature;
inaudible, like the Sphere Harmonies and Eternal Melodies, of which it
is an incarnated fraction. All real talent, I fancy, would much rather,
if it listened only to Nature's monitions, express itself in rhythmic
facts than in melodious words, which latter at best, where they are good
for anything, are only a feeble echo and shadow or foreshadow of the
former. But talents differ much in this of power to be silent; and
circumstances, of position, opportunity and such like, modify them
still more;--and Nature's monitions, oftenest quite drowned in foreign
hearsays, are by no means the only ones listened to in deciding!--The
Industrialisms are all of silent nature; and some of them are heroic
and eminently human; others, again, we may call unheroic, not eminently
human: _beaverish_ rather, but still honest; some are even _vulpine_,
altogether inhuman and dishonest