and as much as it is the duty of the very wealthy
to expend proportionally upon their dress, so is it yours to be
scrupulously economical, and to bring down your aspiring thoughts from
the regions of poetry and romance to the homely duties of mending and
caretaking. There will be poetry and romance too in the generous and
useful employment you may make of the money thus economised. Besides, if
you do not yet see that they exist in the smallest and homeliest of
every-day cares, it is only because your mind has not been sufficiently
developed by experience to find poetry and romance in every act of
self-control and self-denial.

There is, I believe, a general idea that genius and intellectual
pursuits are inconsistent with the minute observations and cares that I
have been recommending; and by nature perhaps they are so. The memoirs
of great men are filled with anecdotes of their incompetency for
commonplace duties, their want of observation, their indifference to
details: you may observe, however, that such men were great in learning
alone; they never exhibited that union of action and thought which is
essential to constitute a heroic character.

We read that a Charlemagne and a Wallenstein could stoop, in the midst
of their vast designs and splendid successes, to the cares of selling
the eggs of their poultry-yard,[68] and of writing minute directions
for its more skilful management.[69] A proper attention to the repair
of the strings of your gowns or the ribbons of your shoes could scarcely
be farther, in comparison, beneath your notice.

The story of Sir Isaac Newton's cat and kitten has often made you smile;
but it is no smile of admiration: such absence of mind is simply
ridiculous. If, indeed, you should refer to its cause you may by
reflection ascertain that the concentration of thought secured by such
abstraction, in his particular case, may have been of use to mankind in
general; but you must at the same time feel that he, even a Sir Isaac
Newton, would have been a greater man had his genius been more
universal, had it extended from the realms of thought into those of
action.

With women the same case is much stronger; their minds are seldom, if
ever, employed on subjects the importance and difficulty of which might
make amends for such concentration of thought as would necessarily,
except in first-rate minds, produce abstraction and inattention to
homely every-day duties.

Even in the case of a genius, on