When the Great Inventor, absorbed in a problem as to Electricity (that
thing which to us is only a name and of which we know nothing), forgets
home, wife, child, supper; and midnight finds him in his laboratory, where
he has been since sunrise--just imagine, if you please, the shrill
greeting that is in cold storage for him when he stumbles home, haggard
and worn, at dawn. How can he explain why he did this thing and answer the
questions as to who was there, and what good it all did anyway!

Thought is a torture, and requires such a concentration of energy that
there is nothing left for the soft courtesies of marriage. The day is
fleeting, and the night cometh when no man can work. The hot impulse to
grasp and materialize the dream ere it fades, is strong upon the man.

Of course he is selfish--he sacrifices everything, as Palissy did when
fuel was short and the clay just at the turning-point. Yes, the artist is
selfish: he sacrifices his wife and society, and himself, too, to get the
work done. Four-o'clocks, mealtime, bedtime, and all the household system
as to pink teas, calls and etiquette, stand for naught. And down the
corridors of Time comes to us the shrill wail of neglected wives, and the
crash of broken hearts echoes like the sound of a painter falling through
a skylight. All this is the price of achievement.

* * * * *

Making a little look backward into Milton's life, we find that until his
thirty-third year he had not tasted of practical life at all. About that
time his father, in a sort of desperation, packed him off to the
Continent, in charge of a trusty attendant, who acted in the dual capacity
of servant and friend. The letters he carried to influential men in Paris,
Florence, Venice and Rome secured him the Speaker's eye, and his beauty