were an indispensable reservoir
of strength to the great invalid. Without it the world would never
have had the "Origin of Species" or the "Descent of Man."

Other instances throng to mind. I have small doubt that Charles Eliot
Norton was the silent partner of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Lowell; Ste.
Clare of Francis of Assisi; Joachim and Billroth of Brahms, and
Dorothy Wordsworth of William. By a pleasant coincidence, I had no
sooner noted down the last of these names than I came upon this
sentence in Sarah Orne Jewett's Letters: "How much that we call
Wordsworth himself was Dorothy to begin with." And soon after, I found
these words in a letter which Brahms sent Joachim with the score of
his second "Serenade": "Care for the piece a little, dear friend; it
is very much yours and sounds of you. Whence comes it, anyway, that
music sounds so friendly, if it is not the doing of the one or two
people whom one loves as I love you?" The impressionable Charles Lamb
must have had many such partners besides his sister Mary. Hazlitt
wrote: "He is one of those of whom it may be said, 'Tell me your
company, and I'll tell you your manners.' He is the creature of
sympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to entertain of
him."

Perhaps the most creative master by proxy I have ever known was the
wife of one of our ex-Presidents. To call upon her was to experience
the elevation and mental unlimbering of three or four glasses of
champagne, with none of that liquid's less desirable after-effects. I
should not wonder if her eminent husband's success were not due as
much to her creativeness as to his own.

It sometimes happens that the most potent masters in their own right
are also the most potent masters by proxy. They grind out more power
than they can consume in their own particular mill-of-the-gods. I am
inclined to think that Sir Humphry Davy was one of these. He was the
discoverer of chlorine and laughing-gas, and the inventor of the
miner's safety lamp. He was also the _deus ex machina_ who rescued
Faraday from the bookbinder's bench, made him the companion of his
travels, and incidentally poured out the overplus of his own creative
energy upon the youth who has recently been called "perhaps the most
remarkable discoverer of the nineteenth century." Schiller was another
of these. "In more senses than one your sympathy is fruitful," wrote
Goethe to him during the composition of "Faust."

Indeed, the greatest Master known to