rs; they bring forth to-day,
to-morrow, continually."

It may be, after all, that the difference is one of those verbal ones
to which Locke draws attention in his _Essay on the Human
Understanding_. Will-power is partly an inheritance and partly an
acquisition. And acquired qualities are always less puissantly
exercised, less effective in the results obtained. Even in poetry it
would appear that, without will to unlock the door, fine faculties
that are dormant may never make their existence known. Balzac gives us
an example of a native will that was for ever rushing through his
being and arousing to activity first one and then another of his
native powers. And, if the total accomplishment was not conform to the
tremendous liberation of force, it was because there was circumstance
harder than will and the intershock of energies that ran counter to
each other.

In fine, alas! there is something absent from the man which would have
both beautified himself and added a saner beauty to his work--the
pursuit of those finer ideals which mean consistent devotion to duty
and broad sympathy with human nature, irrespective of nation, colour,
and position, in its yearnings and in its fate. Fascinated by material
aims, worshipping the Napoleonic epopee to the extent of framing his
conduct by it, measuring the happiness of existence rather by its
honours and furniture than by its moral attainments, he missed the
first poetry of love as he missed the last wisdom of age. This
limitation of the man makes itself sorely felt in his writings, where
we, more often than not, tread a Dane's _Inferno_, unrelieved by the
brighter glimpses and kindlier impulses that still are found in our
world of self-seeking and suffering.

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