usness, or a happy promptitude in following the dictates of his
own genius. The Liberator of Sicily, to be sure, did not live in an age
of newspapers, and was not liable at every turn to have his elbow jogged
by Public Opinion; but it is plain that his notion of a man fit to lead
was, that he should be one who never waited to seize Opportunity from
behind, and who knew that events become the masters of him who is slow
to make them his servants.

Thus far nothing has been more remarkable in the history of our civil
war than that its signal opportunities have failed to produce on either
side any leader who has proved himself to be gifted with this happy
faculty. Even our statesmen seem not to have felt the kindling
inspiration of a great occasion. The country is going through a
trial more crucial, if possible, than that of the Revolution; but no
state-paper has thus far appeared, comparable in anything but quantity
to the documents of our heroic period. Even Mr. Seward seems to have
laid aside his splendid art of generalization, or to have found out the
danger of those specious boomerangs of eloquence, which, launched from
the platform with the most graceful curves of rhetoric, come back not
seldom to deal an untimely blow to him who sets them flying. The people
begin to show signs of impatience that the curtain should be so slow to
rise and show them the great actor in our national tragedy. They are so
used to having a gigantic bubble of notoriety blown for them in a week
by the newspapers, though it burst in a day or two, leaving but a drop
of muddy suds behind it, that they have almost learned to think the
making of a great character as simple a matter as that of a great
reputation. Bewildered as they have been with a mob of statesmen,
generals, orators, poets, and what not, all of them the foremost of this
or any other age, they seem to expect a truly great man on equally easy
terms with these cheap miracles of the press,--grown as rapidly, to be
forgotten as soon, as the prize cauliflower of a county show. We have
improvised an army; we have conjured a navy out of nothing so rapidly
that pines the jay screamed in last summer may be even now listening for
the hum of the hostile shot from Sumter; why not give another rub at our
Aladdin's lamp and improvise a genius and a hero?

This is, perhaps, very natural, but it is nevertheless unreasonable.
Heroes and geniuses are never to be had ready-made, nor was a tolerable
s