Title:  The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864

Author:  Various

Release Date:  May 12, 2005 [EBook #15819]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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[Transcriber’s note:  Footnotes moved to end of document.]

THE

Atlantic monthly.

A Magazine of literature, art, and politics.

VOL.  XIII.—­FEBRUARY, 1864.—­NO.  LXXVI

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by Ticknor and Fields, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

* * * * *

Genius.

When Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when young Colburn gives impromptu solution to a mathematical problem involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder:  such power is separated by the very extent of it from our mental operations.  But when we further observe that these feats are attended by little or no fatigue,—­that this is the play, not the tension of faculty, we recognize a new kind, not merely a new degree, of intelligence.  These men seem to leap, not labor step by step, to their results.  Colburn sees the complication of values, Morphy that of moves, as we see the relation of two and two.  What is multiform and puzzling to us is simple to them, as the universe lies rounded and is one thought in the Original Mind.  We seek in vain for the secret of this mastery.  It is private,—­as deeply hidden from those who have as from those who have it not.  They cannot think otherwise than so, and to this exercise have been provoked by every influence in life.  The boy who is an organized arithmetic and geometry will count all the hills of potatoes and reckon the kernels of corn in a bushel, and his triangles soon begin to cover the barn-door.  He sees nothing but number and dimension; he feeds on these, another fellow on apples and nuts.  But his brother loves application of force, builds wheels and mills; his head is full of cogs and levers and eccentrics; and after he has gone out to his engineering in the great machine-shop of a modern world, the old corn-chamber at home is lumbered with his mysterious contrivances, studies for a self-impelling or gravitating machine and perpetual motion.  Another boy is fired with the mystery of form.  He will draw the cat and dog; his chalk and charcoal are on all our elbows; he carves a ram’s head on his bat, an eagle on a walking-stick, perches