Herbert.  Hear, hear!

The mistress.  Thank you, Herbert.  I applauded you once, when you declaimed that years ago in the old Academy.  I remember how eloquently you did it.

Herbert.  Yes, I was once a spouting idiot.

Just then the door-bell rang, and company came in.  And the company brought in a new atmosphere, as company always does, something of the disturbance of out-doors, and a good deal of its healthy cheer.  The direct news that the thermometer was approaching zero, with a hopeful prospect of going below it, increased to liveliness our satisfaction in the fire.  When the cider was heated in the brown stone pitcher, there was difference of opinion whether there should be toast in it; some were for toast, because that was the old-fashioned way, and others were against it, “because it does not taste good” in cider.  Herbert said there, was very little respect left for our forefathers.

More wood was put on, and the flame danced in a hundred fantastic shapes.  The snow had ceased to fall, and the moonlight lay in silvery patches among the trees in the ravine.  The conversation became worldly.

THIRD STUDY

I

Herbert said, as we sat by the fire one night, that he wished he had turned his attention to writing poetry like Tennyson’s.

The remark was not whimsical, but satirical.  Tennyson is a man of talent, who happened to strike a lucky vein, which he has worked with cleverness.  The adventurer with a pickaxe in Washoe may happen upon like good fortune.  The world is full of poetry as the earth is of “pay-dirt;” one only needs to know how to “strike” it.  An able man can make himself almost anything that he will.  It is melancholy to think how many epic poets have been lost in the tea-trade, how many dramatists (though the age of the drama has passed) have wasted their genius in great mercantile and mechanical enterprises.  I know a man who might have been the poet, the essayist, perhaps the critic, of this country, who chose to become a country judge, to sit day after day upon a bench in an obscure corner of the world, listening to wrangling lawyers and prevaricating witnesses, preferring to judge his fellow-men rather than enlighten them.

It is fortunate for the vanity of the living and the reputation of the dead, that men get almost as much credit for what they do not as for what they do.  It was the opinion of many that Burns might have excelled as a statesman, or have been a great captain in war; and Mr. Carlyle says that if he had been sent to a university, and become a trained intellectual workman, it lay in him to have changed the whole course of British literature!  A large undertaking, as so vigorous and dazzling a writer as Mr. Carlyle must know by this time, since British literature has swept by him in a resistless and widening flood, mainly uncontaminated, and leaving his grotesque contrivances wrecked on the shore with other curiosities of letters, and yet among the richest of all the treasures lying there.