“I have forgotten to mention, he has a very pretty idea of poetical composition: I enclose a fragment which I have found on his table, as well as one of his prose Essays.
“Allow me, as a warm friend of your undertaking, to suggest, that the _substance_ of knowledge is far more valuable than its _technicalities_; and that the vigour of the youthful mind is but _wasted_ on _barren_ learning, and its ardour is _quenched_ in _dry_ disquisition.
On the receipt of this letter, Mr. White will find, to his dissatisfaction, that he has not advanced one hair’s breadth in bringing home to Mr. Brown’s father the real state of the case, and has done no more than present himself as a mark for certain commonplaces, very true, but very inappropriate to the matter in hand. Filled with this disappointing thought, for a while he will not inspect the enclosures of Mr. Brown’s letter, being his son’s attempts at composition. At length he opens them, and reads as follows:
Oh, might I flee to Araby the blest, The world forgetting, but its gifts possessed, Where fair-eyed peace holds sway from shore to shore, And war’s shrill clarion frights the air no more.
Heard ye the cloud-compelling blast(41) awake The slumbers of the inhospitable lake?(42) Saw ye the banner in its pride unfold The blush of crimson and the blaze of gold?
Raglan and St. Arnaud, in high command, Have steamed from old Byzantium’s hoary strand; The famed Cyanean rocks presaged their fight, Twin giants, with the astonished Muscovite.
So the loved maid, in Syria’s balmy noon, Forebodes the coming of the hot simoon, And sighs.… And longs.… And dimly traces.…
“Of all the uncertain and capricious powers which rule our earthly destiny, fortune is the chief. Who has not heard of the poor being raised up, and the rich being laid low? Alexander the Great said he envied Diogenes in his tub, because Diogenes could have nothing less. We need not go far for an instance of fortune. Who was so great as Nicholas, the Czar of all the Russias, a year ago, and now he is ‘fallen, fallen from his high estate, without a friend to grace his obsequies.’(43) The Turks are the finest specimen of the human race, yet they, too, have experienced the vicissitudes of fortune. Horace says that we should wrap ourselves in our virtue, when fortune changes. Napoleon, too, shows us how little we can rely on fortune; but his faults, great as they were, are being redeemed by his nephew, Louis Napoleon, who has shown himself very different from what we expected, though he has never explained how he came to swear to the Constitution, and then mounted the imperial throne.