You are, my poor child, in that revolutionary crisis through which genius
passes in youth before it knows its own self, and longs vaguely to do or
to be a something other than it has done or has been before. For, not to
be unjust to your own powers, genius you have,--that inborn undefinable
essence, including talent, and yet distinct from it. Genius you have,
but genius unconcentrated, undisciplined. I see, though you are too
diffident to say so openly, that you shrink from the fame of singer,
because, fevered by your reading, you would fain aspire to the thorny
crown of author. I echo the hard saying of the Maestro: I should be your
worst enemy did I encourage you to forsake a career in which a dazzling
success is so assured, for one in which, if it were your true vocation,
you would not ask whether you were fit for it; you would be impelled to
it by the terrible star which presides over the birth of poets.

Have you, who are so naturally observant, and of late have become so
reflective, never remarked that authors, however absorbed in their own
craft, do not wish their children to adopt it? The most successful
author is perhaps the last person to whom neophytes should come for
encouragement. This I think is not the case with the cultivators of the
sister arts.

The painter, the sculptor, the musician, seem disposed to invite
disciples and welcome acolytes. As for those engaged in the practical
affairs of life, fathers mostly wish their sons to be as they have been.

The politician, the lawyer, the merchant, each says to his children,
"Follow my steps." All parents in practical life would at least agree
in this,--they would not wish their sons to be poets. There must be some
sound cause in the world's philosophy for this general concurrence of
digression from a road of which the travellers themselves say to those