development of your story, you meditate extending and expanding it), will
embrace the two views of existence,--the integral and the fractional. You
have shown us the former in Leonard, when he is sitting in his mother's
cottage, or resting from his work by the little fount in Riccabocca's
garden. And in harmony with that view of his life, you have surrounded
him with comparative integrals, only subdivided by the tender hands of
their immediate families and neighbours,--your squires and parsons, your
Italian exile and his Jemima. With all these, life is, more or less, the
life natural, and this is always, more or less, the life integral. Then
comes the life artificial, which is always, more or less, the life
fractional. In the life natural, wherein we are swayed but by our own
native impulses and desires, subservient only to the great silent law of
Virtue (which has pervaded the universe since it swung out of chaos), a
man is of worth from what he is in himself,--Newton was as worthy before
the apple fell from the tree as when all Europe applauded the discoverer
of the Principle of Gravity. But in the life artificial we are only of
worth inasmuch as we affect others; and, relative to that life, Newton
rose in value more than a million per cent when down fell the apple from
which ultimately sprang up his discovery. In order to keep civilization
going and spread over the world the light of human intellect, we have
certain desires within us, ever swelling beyond the ease and independence
which belongs to us as integrals. Cold man as Newton might be (he once
took a lady's hand in his own, Kitty, and used her forefinger for his
tobacco-stopper,--great philosopher!), cold as he might be, he was yet
moved into giving his discoveries to the world, and that from motives
very little differing in their quality from the motives that make Dr.
Squills communicate articles to the 'Phrenological Journal' upon the
skulls of Bushmen and wombats. For it is the property of light to
travel. When a man has light in him, forth it must go. But the first
passage of genius from its integral state (in which it has been reposing