FRASER’S MAGAZINE, JANUARY, 1862. THALATTA! THALATTA! A Study at Sea. PART I. THE SAN GRAIL. Makes blither melody. W started at last. It is the never again sweep through the easiest thing in the world to write cloudy valley, and dream as they a book : but it is nearly impossible fell of the triumphant tears that to begin one. That is the reason were wept for them in the Holy why every man who can sign his Land. The moment we all took to name does not belong to the Guild writing, nothing would remain to of Literature.' His feelings are as write about ; for the career of a acute, his passions as tense and writing-man is the most prosaic of imaginative, as your own; he can all careers, and bears telling least fuse them into eloquent deeds, into of any. I would rather hear of eloquent speech; he can charge Columbus, or of Drake, or of Welthe enemy at the head of his co- lington, or of the meanest trooper lumn, he can ask the woman he in his army, than learn how Walter loves to give him back his heart, Scott wrote Marmion, or how or her own; but he cannot write a Shakspeare wrote Macbeth. For book. And why? Because he does those take us with them into the not know how to begin. The in- vivid pressure of living men, and capacity is no doubt a merciful under the smoky glare of battle, provision : for if we all wrote, there or the sad twilight of defeat, human would be none to read. Most au- nature acquires a powerful and thors resemble the late mild-eyed bewitching interest. The Duke's' laureate;they never readanything- life is our great national epic; and heartily at least—that is written by it was a better epic acted by him other people. Wordsworth, indeed, than written by Tennyson. professed to study profoundly, and This incapacity to begin is not, admire keenly, the Book of Nature; however, confined to the writing of but, on cross-examination, it would books. Most men would be estino doubt have appeared that he did mable, charitable, religious, sucnot think nearly so well of it as cessful, if they only knew how to of his own account of it. Moreover, begin. Jones really desires to do none would be left to work. There something for the working-classes : would be no eloquent statesmen, but he does not know where or how no gallant soldiers, no indefatigable to begin ; and so he does nothing. explorers; the fire-struck words Robinson, profoundly versed in the would never again, like hail-stones, principles of jurisprudence, fails at strike upon the upturned faces of the bar; when Brown, who knows VOL. LXV. NO. CCCLXXXV. |