Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/363

 more beloved for its decay, looking dauntless on to poverty and toil, with that conviction of power which is born of collected purpose and earnest will; and recording his secret vow that singlehanded he will undo the work of destroying ages, and restore his line to its place of honour in the land!"

George paused, and tears stood in Darrell's eyes.

"Yes," resumed the scholar--"yes, for the child, for the youth, for the man in his first daring stride into the Action of Life, that object commands our respectful sympathies.

"But wait a few years. Has that object expanded? Has it led on into objects embracing humanity? Remains it alone and sterile in the bosom of successful genius? Or is it prolific and fruitful of grander designs--of more widespreading uses? Make genius successful, and all men have the right to say, 'Brother, help us!' What! no other object still but to build up a house!--to recover a line! What was grand at one stage of an onward career, is narrow and small at another! Ambition limited to the rise of a family!

"Can our sympathies still hallow that? No! In Guy Darrell successful--that ambition was treason to earth! Mankind was his family now! THEREFORE Heaven thwarted the object which opposed its own ends in creating you! THERFORE childless you stand on your desolate hearth! THEREFORE, lo! side by side--yon uncompleted pile--your own uncompleted life!"

Darrell sat dumb.--He was appalled!

GEORGE MORLEY.--"Has not that object stinted your very intellect? Has it not, while baffled in its own centred aim--has it not robbed you of the glory which youth craved, and which manhood might have won? Idolater to the creed of an Ancestor's NAME, has your own name that hold on the grateful respect of the Future, which men ever give to that genius whose objects are knit with mankind? Suddenly, in the zenith of life, amidst cheers, not of genuine renown,--cheers loud and brief as a mob's hurrah--calamities, all of which I know not, nor conjecture, interrupt your career;--and when your own life-long object is arrested, or rather when it is snatched from your eye, your genius renounces all uses. Fame, ever-during, was before you still, had your objects been those for which genius is given. You muse. Heaven permits these rude words to strike home! Guy Darrell, it is not too late!