Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/311

Rh nature, is a just measure of limitations. Taste is not always original, creative. There are no more pathetic lives than the lives of those who know and love the beautiful, and who surrender its enjoyment in a vain struggle to produce it. Their failures react upon finely sensitive natures, and often end in sadness, even misanthropy, and disillusionment when the best of life is over.

Men of talent and experience do learn to concentrate their powers on certain occasions, Fortunate moments. and surprise us with strokes like those of genius. That is where they write "better than they can," as our Autocrat so cleverly has put it. But such efforts are exhausting and briefly sustained. I know it is said that genius also expires when its work is done; but who is to measure its reservoir of force, or to gauge the unseen current which replenishes it?

That there is something which comes without effort, yet impels its possessor to heroic Congenital gift. labor, is immemorially verified. It whispered melodies to Mozart almost in his boyhood, made him a composer at five,—at seven the author of an opus, four sonatas for piano and violin; and it so drew him on to victorious industry, that he asserted in after life: "No one has taken such pains with the study of composition as I!" It made the