Many of us who were remarkable for our indocility in boyhood, and remarkable for nothing else, have found much consolation in this passage. It is most agreeable to be told, by a writer very eminent both for wisdom and for culture, that our untowardness was a hopeful sign. Another popular modern writer has also encouraged us by giving a long list of dunces who have become illustrious. Yet, however flattering it may be to find ourselves in such excellent company, at least so far as the earlier half of life may be concerned, we cannot quite forget the very numerous instances of distinguished persons who began by submitting to the discipline of school and college, and gained honors and reputation there, before encountering the competition of the world. The external discipline applied by schoolmasters is a substitute for that inward discipline which we all so greatly need, and which is absolutely indispensable to culture. Whether a boy happens to be a dunce at school or a youth of brilliant promise, his future intellectual career will depend very much on his moral force. The distinguished men who derived so little benefit from early discipline have invariably subjected themselves to a discipline of another kind which prepared them for the labor of their manhood. It may be a pure assumption to say this, but the assumption is confirmed by every instance that is known to me. Many eminent men have undergone the discipline of business, many like Franklin have been self-disciplined, but I have never heard of a person who had risen to intellectual eminence without voluntary submission to an intellectual discipline of some kind. There are, no doubt, great pleasures attached to the intellectual life, and quite peculiar to it; but these pleasures are the support of discipline and not its negation. They give us the cheerfulness necessary for our work, but they do not excuse us from the work. They are like the cup of coffee served to a soldier on duty, not like the opium which incapacitates for everything but dreaming. I have been led into these observations by a perusal of the new book which you sent me. It has many qualities which in a young writer are full of promise. It is earnest, and lively, and exuberant, but at the same time it is undisciplined. Now I believe it may be affirmed, that although there has been much literature in former ages which was both vigorous and undisciplined, still when an age presents, as ours does, living examples of perfect intellectual discipline, whoever falls below them in this respect contents himself with the very kind of inferiority which of all inferiorities is the easiest to avoid. You cannot, by an effort of the will, hope to rival the brilliance of a genius, but you may quite reasonably expect to obtain as complete a control over your own faculties and your own work as any other highly-cultivated person.