We are always valuing the soul's temperature by the thermometer of
public deed or word. Yet the great sun himself, when he pours his
noonday beams upon some vast hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal
ice-quarries, and floating toward the tropics, never warms it a
fraction above the thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the
moment when the first drop trickled down its side.
How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the
law that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong, to
get as low as the earth will let it! That is genius. But what is this
transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and the rainbow,
to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)--the great outspread
hand of God himself, forcing all things down into their places, and
keeping them there? Such, in smaller proportion, is the force of
character to the fitful movements of genius, as they are or have been
linked to each other in many a household, where one name was historic,
and the other, let, me say the nobler, unknown, save by some faint
reflected ray, borrowed from its lustrous companion.
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