Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 86, February, 1875Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 86, February, 1875
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
life, and what is often so amusing a characteristic in simple, upright
and truthful minds--the notion that on occasion he could be deep enough
to outwit the cunning of the unscrupulous, whereas his loyal
unsuspiciousness of evil was such that he might have been cheated by the
first shallow rogue who chose to exercise his vulpine craft against him.
When I reached Cincinnati I found him intimate with my brother, and a
favorite with my mother, who had formed a high opinion both of his
character and of his talents. The latter had already very markedly
manifested themselves in that direction which finally decided his career
in life. Yet there was little of that dreamy and enthusiastic worship
for the abstract beautiful which is generally supposed to be the marking
characteristic of the artistic temperament. But he had a wonderful
faculty of executing with his hands whatever his mind had conceived, and
a mind singularly active in invention and in devising means for the
execution of a mechanical end. Had circumstances not made him a
sculptor, he might have been--probably would have been--a successful
inventor, mechanician or engineer. Throughout life he was an eminently
and specially _practical_ man--a man whose tendency was not to
dream, but to _do_. That artistic temperament, as it is generally
called, which so often manifests itself in exactly the opposite
direction--in a tendency to dream rather than to do, and to allow the
pleasures of the ideal to incapacitate those who indulge in them for
real work--was so little his that I have never known a more industrious
and conscientious worker with his hands. And there was nothing to which
he could not turn them, and that with a degree of skill that would often
put to shame the attempts of members of the craft which he might be
essaying for the first time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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