not its vast breadth, on which not a wrinkle was visible. And yet,
withal, there was a great family likeness between the two brothers.
When some softer sentiment subdued him, Roland caught the very look of
Augustine; when some high emotion animated my father, you might have
taken him for Roland. I have often thought since, in the greater
experience of mankind which life has afforded me, that if, in early
years, their destinies had been exchanged,--if Roland had taken to
literature, and my father had been forced into action,--each would have
had greater worldly success. For Roland's passion and energy would have
given immediate and forcible effect to study; he might have been a
historian or a poet. It is not study alone that produces a writer, it
is intensity. In the mind, as in yonder chimney, to make the fire burn
hot and quick, you must narrow the draught. Whereas, had my father been
forced into the practical world, his calm depth of comprehension, his
clearness of reason, his general accuracy in such notions as he once
entertained and pondered over, joined to a temper that crosses and
losses could never ruffle, and utter freedom from vanity and self-love,
from prejudice and passion, might have made him a very wise and
enlightened counsellor in the great affairs of life,--a lawyer, a
diplomatist, a statesman, for what I know, even a great general, if his
tender humanity had not stood in the way of his military mathematics.

But as it was,--with his slow pulse never stimulated by action, and too
little stirred by even scholarly ambition,--my father's mind went on
widening and widening till the circle was lost in the great ocean of
contemplation; and Roland's passionate energy, fretted into fever by
every let and hindrance in the struggle with his kind, and narrowed more
and more as it was curbed within the channels of active discipline and
duty, missed its due career altogether, and what might have been the
poet, contracted into the humorist.