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 moment when the first drop trickled down its side.

How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the law that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong, to get as low as the earth will let it!  That is genius.  But what is this transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)—­the great outspread hand of God himself, forcing all things down into their places, and keeping them there?  Such, in smaller proportion, is the force of character to the fitful movements of genius, as they are or have been linked to each other in many a household, where one name was historic, and the other, let me say the nobler, unknown, save by some faint reflected ray, borrowed from its lustrous companion.

Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of the Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle in which I love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall ship glide by against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible towline, with a hundred strong arms pulling it.  Her sails hung unfilled, her streamers were drooping, she had neither side-wheel nor stern-wheel; still she moved on, stately, in serene triumph, as if with her