chance and good fortune, and many have gone down to their
graves without having discovered their unsuspected talent. CURRAN'S
predominant faculty was an exuberance of imagination when excited by
passion; but when young he gave no evidence of this peculiar faculty, nor
for several years, while a candidate for public distinction, was he aware
of his particular powers, so slowly his imagination had developed itself.
It was when assured of the secret of his strength that his confidence, his
ambition, and his industry were excited.

Let the youth preserve his juvenile compositions, whatever these may be;
they are the spontaneous growth, and like the plants of the Alps, not
always found in other soils; they are his virgin fancies. By contemplating
them, he may detect some of his predominant habits, resume a former manner
more happily, invent novelty from an old subject he had rudely designed,
and often may steal from himself some inventive touches, which, thrown
into his most finished compositions, may seem a happiness rather than an
art. It was in contemplating on some of their earliest and unfinished
productions, that more than one artist discovered with WEST that "there
were inventive touches of art in his first and juvenile essay, which, with
all his subsequent knowledge and experience, he had not been able to
surpass." A young writer, in the progress of his studies, should often
recollect a fanciful simile of Dryden--

As those who unripe veins in mines explore
On the rich bed again the warm turf lay,
Till time digests the yet imperfect ore;
And know it will be gold another day.

The youth of genius is that "age of admiration" as sings the poet of
"Human Life," when the spell breathed into our ear by our genius,
fortunate or unfortunate, is--"Aspire!" Then we adore art and the artists.
It was RICHARDSON'S enthusiasm which gave REYNOLDS the raptures he caught
in meditating on the description of a great painter; and REYNOLDS thought
RAPHAEL the most extraordinary man the world had ever produced. WEST, when
a youth, exclaimed that "A painter is a companion for kings and emperors!"
This was the feeling which rendered the thoughts of obscurity painful and
insupportable to their young minds.

But this sunshine of rapture is not always spread over the spring of the
youthful year. There is a season of self-contest, a period of tremors, and
doubts, and darkness. These frequent returns of melancholy, sometimes of
d