acquired and enthusiasm against difficulties is strongest--the years
when, if ever, the artist is made.

That one of the gravest difficulties in our modern civilized life
is the excessive number of liberally educated young men whose
professional ambitions are, and can be, given no outlet, is now well
recognized, and of these, many no doubt, like myself, are diverted
from a natural bent to follow one which has no natural leading or
sequence. It was very possible for a clever man three hundred years
ago to learn all that science could show him without interference with
the acquisition of the special knowledge required to fit him for the
attainment of eminence in a technical study, or the technical mastery
in the working it out, but now the range of a liberal education is
so great that those who are required to take respectable rank in a
specialty must devote themselves exclusively to it, during the years
in which alone technical mastery is possible of acquirement. There
will always be many to whom the devotion to study for study's sake is
invincible, but the ranks of the brain-workers are so overcrowded that
it is a great pity to force into them a man or woman who would be
content to be a worker in another and humbler line, especially in
those of the manual occupations which bring their happiness in the
following of them. In my case the result of the imposed career was a
disaster; I was diverted from the only occupation to which I ever had
a recognizable calling, and ultimately I drifted into journalism,
as the consequence of a certain literary facility developed by the
exercises of the college course. The consequences were the graver that
I was naturally too much disposed to a vagrant life; and the want of
a dominant interest in my occupation led to indulgence, on every
occasion that offered in later life, of the tendency to wander. I came
out of the experience with a divided allegiance, enough devotion to