former will be perpetually coming to grief in one or the other of them. If he is entertaining, he will abuse the grandmother of the most influential man at his table. If he dines out, he will ask for fish twice in spite of the waning proportions of the cod, and the indignant glances of the lady of the house. As a contributor to the revenue, he will be always in arrears and incurring the terrors of the Somerset House. At a railway station, he will disturb the equanimity of the porters by a fussiness arising from a vague but awful regard of steampower. In all dealings with horse-flesh he will be guided by the simple rule of buying in the dearest market, and selling in the cheapest. As a letter-writer, he shows characteristic näiveté. There is a curious infelicity in his style. To a subordinate he will write with undue familiarity, or an air of ridiculous assumption, to an equal, with a smack of arrogance. The oddest rays of comfort will gleam across his letters of condolence, while his congratulations will partake of a somewhat funereal character. In addressing members of those worldwide families, he will not be particular as to the 'y' in Smyth, or the 'p' in Thompson." The sum of the matter is, that life is action. Thoughts and schemes, while they remain such, will avail you nothing, unless you are a Buddhist, bent on amalgamating yourself by meditation with the ineffable and divine essence. A Boston gentle man, who takes a business view of things, did not untruly characterize the whole race of poetic impracticables in a single felicitous sentence. Being asked the character of a certain transcendentalist, "O," said he, "he is one of those men who have soarings after the infinite, and divings after the unfathomable, but who never pay cash!" The want of practical talent in men of fine intellectual powers has often excited the wonder of the crowd. They are astonished that one whose genius has grasped, perhaps, the mightiest themes, and shed a flood of light on the path to be pursued by others, should be unable to manage his own affairs with dexterity. But this is not strange. Deep thinking and practical talents require habits of mind almost entirely dissimilar. A man who sees limitedly and clearly is both more sure of himself, and is more direct in dealing with circumstances and with others, than a man with a large horizon of thought, whose many-sided capacity embraces an immense extent of objects and objections, just as a horse with blinkers chooses his path more surely and is less likely to shy. Besides, it must be remembered that energy and self-possession alone, without superiority of intellect, suffice to give a man practical talent. There is no force in intellectual ability, mere intellectual ability, standing, to use a phrase of Burke, "in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction." It is passion which is the moving, vitalizing power; and a minimum of brains will often achieve more, when fired by a strong will, than a vastly larger portion with no energy to set it in motion. Practical men cut the knots which they cannot untie, and, overleaping all logical preliminaries, come at once to a conclusion. Men of genius, on the other hand, are tempted to waste time in meditating and comparing, when they should act instantaneously and with power. They are apt, too, to give unbridled license to their imaginations, and, desiring harmonious impossibilities, to foresee the difficulties so clearly that action is foregone. They have put microscopes to their eyes, and cannot drink for fear of the animalcules. In short, they theorize too much. A loaf baked is better than a harvest contemplated. An acre in Cook County is better than a principality in Utopia. Genius, to be practically useful, says the author of Lacon, "must be endowed, not only with wings whereby to fly, but with legs whereon to stand." Both practical and speculative ability, are, no doubt, modifications of mental power; but one, on that account, by no means implies the other, any more than dexterity in performing a juggler's feats involves the art of reefing a sail, though they are both instances of physical skill. CHAPTER X. DECISION. "Lose this day loitering, 't will be the same story To-morrow, and the next more dilatory; He (the upright student) keeps his purpose, and whatever he has resolved to do, that he does, were it only because he has resolved to do it. FICHTE. But so it is with many men: "We long for the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price," and so stand chaffering with fate in vexatious altercation till the night comes and our fair is over. CARLYLE. "There is nothing so imprudent as excessive prudence." IT is but a truism to say that there can be no success in life without decision of character. In spite of De Quincey's protest, we believe that John Foster, in his celebrated essay, did not exaggerate the importance of that quality, though we admit that it is not strictly a moral power, and that the most inexorable decision is much more closely connected with physical differences of temperament than with any superiority of mind. Indeed, Foster himself expresses the opinion that, could the histories of all the persons remarkable for decisive character be known, it would be found that the majority of them have possessed great constitutional firmness. By this is not meant an exemption from disease and pain, nor any certain measure of mechanical strength, but a tone of vigor, the opposite to lassitude, and adapted to great exertion and endurance. Decision of mind, like vigor of body, is a gift of God. It cannot be created by human effort. It can only be cultivated. It has been truly said that, as resolution, or strength of will, is a primary power in man, there is no higher power which can give birth to it, for this higher power would necessarily involve the existence of the lower that was to be produced. But every man has the germ of this quality, which can be cultivated by favorable circumstances and motives presented to the mind; and, by method and order in the prosecution of his duties or tasks, he may by habit greatly augment his will-power, or beget a frame of mind so nearly resembling resolution that it would be difficult to distinguish between the two. Let no one despair because he has often broken his resolutions. Fichte has well observed that nothing is more destructive of character than for a man to lose all faith in his own resolutions, because he has so often determined, and again determined, to do that which, nevertheless, he has never done. Here, as elsewhere, "the stature of the perfect man" is attained only by slow gradations of travail, study, effort, and patience. The whole armor cannot be put on at once. The first victory will render the succeeding one easier, until the very combat will be desired for the luxury of certain conquest. "The angel of martyrdom is brother to the angel of victory.' But, whether inborn or acquired, decision is a quality vitally important to him who would get on in the world. Even brains are secondary in importance to will. The intellect is but the half of a man; the will is the driving-wheel, the spring of motive power. A vacillating man, no matter what his abilities, is invariably pushed aside in the race of life by the man of determined will. It is he who resolves to succeed, and who at every fresh rebuff begins resolutely again, that reaches the goal. The shores of fortune are covered with the stranded wrecks of men of brilliant ability, but who have wanted courage, faith, and decision, and have therefore perished in sight of more resolute but less capable adventurers, who succeeded in making port. Hundreds of men go to their graves in obscurity, who have been obscure only because they lacked the pluck to make a first effort; and who, could they only have resolved to begin, would have astonished the world by their achievements and successes. The fact is, as Sydney Smith has well said, "that, in order to do anything in this world that is worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank, and thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can. It will not do to be perpetually calculating and adjusting nice chances; it did all very well before the Flood, when a man could consult his friends upon an intended publication for a hundred and fifty years, and then live to see its success for six or seven centuries afterwards; but at present a man waits, and doubts, and hesitates, and consults his brother, and his uncle, and his first-cousins, and his particular friends, till one day he finds that he is sixty-five years of age, - that he has lost so much time in consulting first-cousins and particular friends, that he has no more time left to follow their advice." The world was not made for slow, squeamish, fastidious men, but for those who act instantaneously and with power. Obstacles and perplexities every man must meet, and he must either promptly conquer them, or they will conquer him. It is rarely that the comparative good and evil of different modes of action are equally balanced; and he who would do anything to the purpose in this world should perceive the slightest inclination of the beam with an eagle's glance. It is better to decide wrong occasionally, than to be forever wavering and hesitating, now veering to this side and then to that, with all the misery and disaster that follow from continual doubt. It has been truly said that the great moral victories and defeats of the world often turn on minutes. Fortune is proverbially a fickle jade, and there is nothing like promptness of action, the timing of things at the lucky moment, to force her to surrender her favors. Crises come, the seizing of which is triumph, the neglect of which is ruin. This is particularly true on the field of battle. Nearly every battle turns on one or two rapid movements executed amid the whirl of smoke and thunder of guns that jar the solid globe. It was at such mo |