ntillating
novelties. When the sparks fade there is darkness. How many such
glittering spectacles this century has witnessed!

There is another sort of success which does not startlingly or at once
declare itself. Sometimes it comes with little observation. The
reputation is slowly built up, as by a patient process of nature.
It is curious, as Philip wrote once in an essay, to see this unfolding in
Lowell's life. There was no one moment when he launched into great
popularity--nay, in detail, he seemed to himself not to have made the
strike that ambition is always expecting. But lo! the time came when, by
universal public consent, which was in the nature of a surprise to him,
he had a high and permanent place in the world of letters.

In anticipating Philip's career, however, it must not be understood that
he had attained any wide public recognition. He was simply enrolled in
the great army of readers and was serving his apprenticeship. He was
recognized as a capable man by those who purvey in letters to the
entertainment of the world. Even this little foothold was not easily
gained in a day, as the historian discovered in reading some bundles of
old letters which Philip wrote in this time of his novitiate to Celia and
to his cousin Alice.

It was against Celia's most strenuous advice that he had trusted himself
to a literary career. "I see, my dear friend," she wrote,
in reply to his announcement that he was going that day to Mr. Hunt to
resign his position, "that you are not happy, but whatever your
disappointment or disillusion, you will not better yourself by
surrendering a regular occupation. You live too much in the imagination
already."

Philip fancied, with that fatuity common to his sex, that he had worn an
impenetrable mask in regard to his wild passion for Evelyn, and did not
dream that, all along, Celia had read him like an open book. She judged
Philip quite accurately. It was herself that she did not know, and she
would have repelled as nonsense the suggestion that her own restlessness
and her own changing experiments in occupation were due to the
unsatisfied longings of a woman's heart.

"You must not think," the letter went on, "that I want to dictate, but I
have noticed that men--it may be different with women--only succeed by
taking one path and diligently walking in it. And literature is not a
career, it is just a toss up, a lottery, and woe to you if you once draw
a lucky number--you will always