away the present certainty of becoming a wealthy man, for the sake of
the future chance of turning out a great painter.

If he had really possessed genius, there would have been nothing very
remarkable in this part of his history, so far; but having nothing of
the kind, holding not the smallest spark of the great creative fire in
his whole mental composition, surely there was something very
discouraging to contemplate, in the spectacle of a man resolutely
determining, in spite of adverse home circumstances and strong home
temptation, to abandon all those paths in life, along which he might
have walked fairly abreast with his fellows, for the one path in which
he was predestinated by Nature to be always left behind by the way. Do
the announcing angels, whose mission it is to whisper of greatness to
great spirits, ever catch the infection of fallibility from their
intercourse with mortals? Do the voices which said truly to
Shakespeare, to Raphael, and to Mozart, in their youth-time,--You are
chosen to be gods in this world--ever speak wrongly to souls which they
are not ordained to approach? It may be so. There are men enough in all
countries whose lives would seem to prove it--whose deaths have not
contradicted it.

But even to victims such as these, there are pleasant resting-places on
the thorny way, and flashes of sunlight now and then, to make the
cloudy prospect beautiful, though only for a little while. It is not
all misfortune and disappointment to the man who is mentally unworthy
of a great intellectual vocation, so long as he is morally worthy of
it; so long as he can pursue it honestly, patiently, and
affectionately, for its own dear sake. Let him work, though ever so
obscurely, in this spirit towards his labor, and he shall find the
labor itself its own exceeding great reward. In that reward lives the