on its own wealth) into the fractional is usually through a hard and
vulgar pathway. It leaves behind it the reveries of solitude,--that
self-contemplating rest which may be called the Visionary,--and enters
suddenly into the state that may be called the Positive and Actual.
There it sees the operations of money on the outer life; sees all the
ruder and commoner springs of action; sees ambition without nobleness,
love without romance; is bustled about and ordered and trampled and
cowed,--in short, it passes an apprenticeship with some Richard Avenel,
and does not detect what good and what grandeur, what addition even to
the true poetry of the social universe, fractional existences like
Richard Avenel's bestow; for the pillars that support society are like
those of the Court of the Hebrew Tabernacle,--they are of brass, it is
true, but they are filleted with silver. From such intermediate state
Genius is expelled and driven on its way, and would have been so in this
case had Mrs. Fairfield (who is but the representative of the homely
natural affections, strongest ever in true genius,--for light is warm)
never crushed Mr. Avenel's moss rose on her sisterly bosom. Now, forth
from this passage and defile of transition into the larger world, must
Genius go on, working out its natural destiny amidst things and forms the
most artificial. Passions that move and influence the world are at work
around it. Often lost sight of itself, its very absence is a silent
contrast to the agencies present. Merged and vanished for a while amidst
the Practical World, yet we ourselves feel all the while that it is
there; is at work amidst the workings around it. This practical world
that effaces it rose out of some genius that has gone before; and so each
man of genius, though we never come across him, as his operations proceed
in places remote from our thoroughfares, is yet influencing the practical
world that ignores him, for ever and ever. That is GENIUS! We can't
describe it in books; we can only hint and suggest it by the accessories
which we artfully heap about it. The entrance of a true Probationer into