A good deal more of what he writes is poor enough; and many days he could not write at all. By long habit the mind may be made capable of being put in harness daily for the humbler task of producing prose; but you cannot say, when you harness it in the morning, how far or at what rate it will run that day. Go and see a great organ of which you have been told. Touch it, and you hear the noble tones at once. The organ can produce them at any time. But go and see a great man; touch _him_,--that is, get him to begin to talk. You will be much disappointed, if you expect, certainly, to hear anything like his book or his poem. A great man is not a man who is always saying great things, or who is always able to say great things. He is a man who on a few occasions has said great things; who on the coming of a sufficient occasion may possibly say great things again; but the staple of his talk is commonplace enough. Here is a point of difference from machinery, with all machinery's apparent caprice. You could not say, as you pointed to a steam-engine, "The usual power of that engine is two hundred horses; but once or twice it has surprised us all by working up to two thousand." No; the engine is always of nearly the power of two thousand horses, if it ever is. But what we have been supposing as to the engine is just what many men have done. Poe wrote "The Raven"; he was working then up to two thousand horse power. But he wrote abundance of poor stuff, working at about twenty-five. Read straight through the volumes of Wordsworth, and I think you will find traces of the engine having worked at many different powers, varying from twenty-five horses or less up two thousand or more. Go and hear a really great preacher, when he is preaching in his own church upon a common Sunday, and possibly you may hear a very ordinary sermon. I have heard Mr. Melvill preach very poorly. You must not expect to find people always at their best. It is a very unusual thing that even the ablest men should be like Burke, who could not talk with an intelligent stranger for five minutes without convincing the stranger that he had talked for five minutes with a great man. And it is an awful thing, when some clever youth is introduced to some local poet who has been told how greatly the clever youth admires him, and what vast expectations the clever youth has formed of his conversation, and when the local celebrity makes a desperate effort to talk up to the expectations formed of him. I have witnessed such a scene; and I can sincerely say that I could not previously have believed that the local celebrity could have made such a fool of himself. He was resolved to show that he deserved his fame, and to show that the mind which had produced those lovely verses in the country newspaper could not stoop to commonplace things. * * * * *