compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index which can split a
second into tenths, with the musical chime which can turn every quarter
of an hour into melody. She has chosen a plain one, that keeps good
time, and that is all.

Let her alone! She knows what she is about. Genius has an infinitely
deeper reverence for character than character can have for genius. To
be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its work is a tangible
product, to be bought, or had for nothing. It bribes the common voice
to praise it by presents of speeches, poems, statues, pictures, or
whatever it can please with. Character evolves its best products for
home consumption; but, mind you, it takes a deal more to feed a family
for thirty years than to make a holiday feast for our neighbors once or
twice in our lives. You talk of the fire of genius. Many a blessed
woman, who dies unsung and unremembered, has given out more of the real
vital heat that keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting
through her humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a
dozen theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of
so many men of genius. It is in _latent caloric_, if I may borrow a
philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out the
life that warms them. Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse hardly
warms her thin fingers,--but she has melted all the ice out of the
hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the blood of her
youthful heroes.

We are always valuing the soul's temperature by the thermometer of
public deed or word. Yet the great sun himself, when he pours his
noonday beams upon some vast hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal
ice-quarries, and floating toward the tropics, never warms it a
fraction above the thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the