Thus the men of talent are almost invariably recognized and crowned in their own days; because they always deal with ideas in a measure already familiar to the multitude. But, alas for the sensitive child of genius! The bold explorer of untrodden paths must cut away the underbrush that others may follow him; he must himself create the taste in the masses, by which he is afterward to be judged. His bold, daring, and original conceptions serve only to dazzle, confuse, and blind the multitude; and as it requires time to understand them, to read their living characters of glowing light, the laurel wreaths of appreciation and sympathy, which should have graced his brow and cheered his heart, too often trail their deathless green in vain luxuriance round the chill marble covering the early grave of a broken heart. Ah, friends! Genius demands sympathy in its impassioned creations; loving and laboring for humanity, it exacts comprehension, at least, in return. Yet how very difficult it is for an artist to win such comprehension! And, by a strange fatality, the more original his compositions, the greater the difficulty. He must amuse the men of the senses; satisfy the precision of the men of the schools; and succeed in rendering intelligible to the uncultured masses the subtile links of ethereal connection which chain the finite, the relative of his compositions, to the Infinite, the Absolute. For it is a pregnant fact, with regard to the masses, that only so far as they can be made to _feel_ the connection of things with the Absolute, can they be induced to appreciate them. For instance, tell them that the stars attract in the direct ratio of their masses, in inverse ratio to the squares of the distance, and they may almost fail to understand you; but tell them, in the words of the Divine Book, so marvellously adapted to their comprehension, that 'the stars declare the glory of God,' and you are at once understood. Tell them they ought to love one another, because 'they are members of the same spiritual body'--and, although, in this concise statement, you have declared to them the internal constitution of the moral world, revealed the inner meaning of the laws of order, of social harmony, of their own destiny, and of the progress of the race--you may utterly fail in awakening their interest. But show them a Being who lived for this truth, whose life was one of sacrifice and abnegation, who died for its manifestation--they are immediately touched, interested, because you have left the unsympathetic region of abstract formulas; you have given law a visible, palpitating, feeling, suffering, and rejoicing Body--you awaken their love, their gratitude--they adore their godlike Brother, and now _feel_ themselves members of the one spiritual body.