Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/704

684 some sort of galvanic life! In the higher provinces, too, your intellectual men are distributed into departments and sub-departments as writers or speakers, while life in the walks of fashion is a game of consumption and show. And when on the part of busy men the day's arduous endeavors toward the continuance of sublime human life are accomplished, and leisure is left for reflection, then a glass of beer, a pipe, cards, coffee and cake, a game at billiards or whist, a novel from the circulating library, is illimitable scope for the spiritual faculties.

And if we turn to our highest spiritual institutions we see equal signs of prosperity. At all our famous universities droves of young men called "students" are invited to profane the holiest names and symbols under the pretext of studying them, as if the first and foremost condition to intellectual activity or "study" were not a certain degree of spiritual faculty, of purification of the heart. The towns where they are collected for spiritual culture they defile more scandalously than any other class which makes no pretensions to spiritual culture.

Even if we single, out of the whole range of human history, the few men of genius whom we are constrained to regard as the eminently favored and endowed of our race, we find what a broken career has been allotted to the most of them. Have not many of them, possessing courage to inspire, intelligence to enlighten, sensibility to refine the world, sickened under the languor of neglect or got embittered at the endless contradictions and misrepresentations of their fellows, dying at last as unfortunate men, unhappy to themselves, unbeneficial to their contemporaries? What an evil is the not unfrequent depravity of genius, and which under happier circumstances might have been a great salutary influence instead! Might not the tremendous forces of Swift, for example, have been turned to better account than left to explode in shocks of half diabolic hate in earlier days, and in madness at the end? Think of the generous human heart, brave will, and clear head of Burns, a man of quite transcendent powers, yet fain to slink past on the shady side of the street, left to bleed so wretchedly to death in the midsummer of his days. Contemplate the great intellect and great heart of Lessing, a man of thrice excellent mother-wit and effectiveness, disposing with a lordly air of the whole literature of Europe, awakening with his clarion-voice his slumbering nation to new intellectual conquests, yet himself imprisoned for so many of his best years in the stifling library-dust of Wolfenbüttel, isolated there in the midst of an unhealthy swamp; the world such a dish of skimmed milk as to be incapable of any sense of honor. Was not Lessing's child a boy of remarkable sense, who no sooner came into the world than, seeing his mistake, made out of it double-quick? Is it not probable that many brave souls, braver and better perhaps than any known to fame, have gone down to silence unregarded, the world's stupidity being more than a match for the gods themselves? Think of good