Nell and other characters. Shelley used to run up to an infant, put his ear close to its lips, and listen with the expectation of hearing the language of the spheres! Poor Shelley! he no doubt had sometimes thoughts and visions which even his genius was inadequate to express. For

Thought is deeper than all speech;

Feeling deeper than all thought;
Souls to souls can never teach

What unto themselves was taught.

Now this lack of power to produce on the part of the admirers of genius may not be inherent, but proceed from want of training, want of practice, want of special culture in a given direction. They have been compelled to devote their whole energies to the production of food, to the gaining of a living for themselves and others, and thus certain powers of their minds have lain dormant and inactive. The poor souls have thus been denied the possession of a faculty which they have simply been unable to develop. Not that they could, under any circumstances, have become Homers, Miltons, Shakespeares and Scotts; but they might possibly have done much finer work than they have done; they might possibly have equalled many clever men who have had greater advantages. The writer of this paper would certainly never have been able to write what he is now writing had he not in his youth been placed, accidentally or providentially, at the trade of a printer instead of that of a shoemaker or carpenter. At this trade he became familiar with the expression of thought, which he would not have done had he been made a shoemaker or carpenter. So with thousands of others.

We are

all largely the creatures of circumstance. Individuals make the same experience as nations; for civilization did not begin until the Nile, by its fertilizing overflowings, caused the earth to produce spontaneously abundance of food, and thus afforded men time to think, study, write, build, and acquire that "mastery that comes to natural aptitude from the hardest study of any art or science."

I agree with Pope's famous dictum :

True wit is nature to advantage dressed;

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

Genius simply expresses what all men think, hope, or fear. And literary expression, like painting, sculpture, building, acting, drawing and so on, needs training as well as natural capacity. Indeed all these are merely different modes of expression, for the works of all artists are but efforts to give expression to conceptions of the mind. The painter, the sculptor, the architect, the actor, are all striving to embody in some shape their conceptions of beauty, of dignity, of grandeur, or of misery.

Listen to what the great master of expression says:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to

heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings

A local habitation and a name.

So that it is he whose pen, chisel, or brush "bodies forth the forms of things unknown," conceptions of beauty, grandeur, or misery, that proves himself a man of genius. 'Shakespeare's great and peculiar

genius," says Richard Grant White, "was not the genius of observation, of study, of cogitation, of labor; it was an intuitive, inborn knowledge of men and things in their elemental, eternal nature, and of their consequent relations, combined with an inborn faculty of expressing that knowledge such as has never been manifested in speech or writing by any other man known to history. And chiefly his genius lay in that power of expression. It is probable that many have approached him in his insight of man and nature; those who understand him and enjoy him must approach him in this respect more or less remotely, or they would neither understand nor enjoy him." But none have approached him in expression.

CHAPTER V.

THE POWER OF EXPRESSION-NEWSPAPER READING.

O me there is something profoundly sad in the early extinction of genius. I always think, on hearing of the early death of a man of genius, "What might not such a man have accomplished had he only lived!" and I go on imagining the great things he might have done. Few men of genius live long. The allotted years of the Psalmist are seldom allotted to them. The fire that is in them seems to burn them up sooner than that of other men; and, unhappily, some of them seem unaccountably intent upon making this fire burn as fiercely as possible. What might not Mirabeau, or Burns, or Byron, have accomplished had they only husbanded the taper of life, instead of burning it at both ends!

One of the most recent of these early extinctions is that of the late Professor E. R. Sill, a man of rare powers and estimable character, whose papers on art and literature in the Atlantic Monthly are among the best things that I have read in recent years. Take a sample of his quality—a sample which bears directly upon the subject in hand, expression:

"We pass along a picture gallery, or turn the leaves of a volume of verse. As we pass before some painting, or some poem, the question is, What does this give me? It may be that it gives the imagination some pretty image of nature. That is something. It may be that it gives the feeling also; some touch of suggested peace or tranquility. That is more. But if it be a great picture, or a great poem, the whole spirit in us is quickened to renewed life. Not only our sense of color and form, our perception of harmonious relations, but our interest in some crisis of human destiny, our thought concerning this, a hundred mingled streams of fancy and reflection and will impulse, are set flowing in us; because all this was present in the man of genius who produced the work, and because his expression of it there means the carrying of it over from his spirit into ours. it be a work of the greatest rank, we are more, from hat moment and forever. [Consider the weighty meaning of these words, and how strongly it illustrates the dignity of the artist's profession.] For out of the life the artist or poet has given us, will be born successive new accessions of life perpetually. The art of literature is the highest of the arts, because its power of expression is the greatest." The author of these words is dead; but his spirit, here and elsewhere, will live forever!

If

I have said that most men, the admirers of Homer and Milton, Shakespeare and Scott, possess some genius, some sparks of the divine fire. Most men, however, are not, unhappily, readers of classic literature. There are but few, comparatively, who read "the best that has been thought and said in the world." Mr. G. W.