neglected, any success commensurate to his contemporaneous repute;--how
unlikely! But a success which should outlive that repute, win the
"everlasting inheritance" which could alone have nerved him to adequate
effort--how impossible! He could not himself comprehend why, never at a
loss for language felicitously opposite or richly ornate when it had but
to flow from his thought to his tongue, nor wanting ease, even eloquence,
in epistolary correspondence confidentially familiar--he should find
words fail ideas, and ideas fail words, the moment his pen became a wand
that conjured up the Ghost of the dread Public! The more copious his
thoughts, the more embarrassing their selection; the more exquisite his
perception of excellence in others, the more timidly frigid his efforts
at faultless style. It would be the same with the most skilful author,
if the Ghost of the Public had not long since ceased to haunt him. While
he writes, the true author's solitude is absolute or peopled at his will.
But take an audience from an orator, what is he? He commands the living
public--the Ghost of the Public awes himself.

"Surely once," sighed Darrell, as he gave his blurred pages to the
flames--" surely once I had some pittance of the author's talent, and
have spent it upon lawsuits!"

The author's talent, no doubt, Guy Darrell once had--the author's
temperament never. What is the author's temperament? Too long a task to
define. But without it a man may write a clever book, a useful book, a
book that may live a year, ten years, fifty years. He will not stand out
to distant ages a representative of the age that rather lived in him than
he in it. The author's temperament is that which makes him an integral,
earnest, original unity, distinct from all before and all that may
succeed him. And as a Father of the Church has said that the
consciousness of individual being is the sign of immortality, not granted