. Your born genius must make his choice.

If a soul is born with divine intelligence, and has its lips touched
with hallowed fire, in consecration for high enterprises under the sun,
this young soul will find the question asked of him by England every
hour and moment: "Canst thou turn thy human intelligence into the beaver
sort, and make honest contrivance, and accumulation of capital by it? If
so, do it; and avoid the vulpine kind, which I don't recommend. Honest
triumphs in engineering and machinery await thee; scrip awaits
thee, commercial successes, kingship in the counting-room, on the
stock-exchange;--thou shalt be the envy of surrounding flunkies, and
collect into a heap more gold than a dray-horse can draw."--"Gold, so
much gold?" answers the ingenuous soul, with visions of the envy of
surrounding flunkies dawning on him; and in very many cases decides that
he will contract himself into beaverism, and with such a horse-draught
of gold, emblem of a never-imagined success in beaver heroism, strike
the surrounding flunkies yellow.

This is our common course; this is in some sort open to every creature,
what we call the beaver career; perhaps more open in England, taking in
America too, than it ever was in any country before. And, truly, good
consequences follow out of it: who can be blind to them? Half of a most
excellent and opulent result is realized to us in this way; baleful
only when it sets up (as too often now) for being the whole result. A
half-result which will be blessed and heavenly so soon as the other half
is had,--namely wisdom to guide the first half. Let us honor all honest
human power of contrivance in its degree. The beaver intellect, so
long as it steadfastly refuses to be vulpine, and answers the tempter
pointing out short routes to it with an honest "No, no," is truly
respectable to me; and many a highflying speaker and singer whom I have
known, has appeared to me much less of a developed man than certain
of my mill-owning, agricultural, commercial, mechanical, or otherwise
industrial friends, who have held their peace all their days and gone on
in the silent state. If a man can keep his intellect silent, and make it
even into honest beaverism, several very manful moralities, in danger
of wreck on other courses, may comport well with that, and give it a
genuine and partly human character; and I will tell him, in these days
he may do far worse with himself and his intellect than change it into