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.
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