now! For I have your love, uncle, and I am at ease in my mind. I am so happy to what I was! and sometimes it almost frightens me to feel how happy I am. But I must not talk of this. MARHAM. Oliver, my dear Oliver AUBIN. And all the Uncle, you know what poor Keats's end was. He died of a broken heart; or rather of consumption, brought on by wrongs done to him, and by anxiety, and by the want of any prospect in life, such as any one of ten thousand persons might have opened to him. His poems are testimonies of the world's strange character. They are loved, dearly loved, now; but now the author cannot be honored nor helped in life. greater truths that are in the world, — what are they? They are what were coined by wise men out of their experience. And then did they pay them away? No; but they gave them, like charity, on the way-side of life. The noble spirits! And then they were hooted, like the utterers of base coin; and if any one of them had a fast friend, he was scowled at and suspected. This wickedness, uncle, you and I have never been guilty of, I trust. But wherever genius is to be seen, we reverence it like light that is not without a something divine in it; and we do not think the worse of a man, because, in the world's darkness, God has given him that light to hold. MARHAM. Genius often has ill success in the world. AUBIN. To the world's great shame; for genius is only a genial working of the mind, a conjoint action of the moral and the intellectual powers. A man of the highest genius is a highly moral and a highly religious man, and a man of infinite love. Is he disabled for success in the world, for getting - money and friends? So he is in some respects; but it is in what respects are immoral and irreligious. Men of some genius have done wrong things; so they have, for they were men; but they would have done worse things but for their genius. A man of perfect genius is a man of trembling sensibility, of the greatest delicacy of feeling, of honesty most scrupulous, and of a temper to help the needy as much as he can. The conduct of such a man is like Christianity in action, and very often it is not very unlike Christ in its end, in this world. MARHAM. Oliver, you are, but you do not quite mean Oliver, our Lord Jesus was crucified, and it was for his goodness. Perhaps it was impossible that there could ever be a greater contrast than there was between Jesus in the image of God, and the Jewish priesthood in their priestcraft. Nothing at all like such a moral contrast can possibly exist now. AUBIN. O, yes, uncle, there does; and it is between Christianity and the manners of the world. My dear uncle, you know nothing of life, nothing at all of the badness of it. I do not mean to say, that there are not hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of positions, in which men may and do act as Christians. But I do mean to say, that there are very common circumstances, in which a man fails, as a matter of course, if he does to others as he would have them do to him. MARHAM. Do you think it would prove so, Oliver, if it were tried? AUBIN. Uncle, if you were to put a bit of gold into a bushel of pease, and the measure were then to be well shaken for a time, would not the gold go to the bottom? MARHAM. Yes, Oliver, it would, it would. AUBIN. Through having genius, does a man fail in the world? It is grandly, and like the dying of a martyr; and not because the man is not fit, and the best fitted, for any work, the lowliest and the highest. MARHAM. Oliver, I agree with you quite. I have been provoking you to talk. AUBIN. O uncle, have you? Then you will agree me in what I am going to say. What is it? MARHAM. with AUBIN. That the way in which often genius gets treated, in this life, argues there being a life to come. If there were no grounds given us for expecting another world, still it might be believed in, and it would be, by some few better persons, though it were only as a place in which for wisdom to be justified of her children. MARHAM. Yes, Oliver, I do quite agree with you. AUBIN. Of all the proofs of an hereafter offered by human nature itself, to my mind there are none so conclusive as the sufferings of the righteous for righteousness' sake; or as those miseries that are brought upon a man through his goodness. A man's nature has been too good for the sympathy of his fellow-creatures; then how solemnly suggestive this is of what must surely be the great love of God for it. CHAPTER X. Still in the soul sounds the deep underchime For otherwise why thus should man deplore AUBIN. WILLIAMS. YES, uncle, I know what that feeling is. MARHAM. All the good I have done seems nothing, and all that I have attempted would go into a nutshell. AUBIN. A nutshell! The whole world would go into it, seas, mountains, and air. So Sir Humphrey Davy has said. MARHAM. And in one of the Psalms, David has said of God, that he takes up the isles as a very little thing. And we that live on the islands, what are we? Ants on molehills we are, and less still. AUBIN. What then? For the less we feel ourselves, the better; the meaner, the happier; because, like |