the pleasure he receives. It is not beauty that he loves,
nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so;
his design and his sufficient reward is to verify his own
existence and taste the variety of human fate. To him,
before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all that is
not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears
a face of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in later
days; or if there be any exception--and here destiny
steps in--it is in those moments when, wearied or
surfeited of the primary activity of the senses, he calls
up before memory the image of transacted pains and
pleasures. Thus it is that such an one shies from all
cut-and-dry professions, and inclines insensibly toward
that career of art which consists only in the tasting and
recording of experience.

This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an
impatience of all other honest trades, frequently exists
alone; and so existing, it will pass gently away in the
course of years. Emphatically, it is not to be regarded;
it is not a vocation, but a temptation; and when your
father the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so pro-
perly discouraged your ambition, he was recalling not im-
probably some similar passage in his own experience.
For the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the
vocation is rare. But again we have vocations which are
imperfect; we have men whose minds are bound up, not
so much in any art, as in the general ars artium and
common base of all creative work; who will now dip into
painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon will be
inditing a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often
with genuine knowledge. And of this temper, when it
stands alone, I find it difficult to speak; but I should

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