The reason of this ease may be that perfect performance is ever more the effluence of a man’s nature than the conscious labor of his hands.  That the hands are faithfully busy therein, that every faculty contributes its purest industry, no one could for a moment doubt; since there could not be a total action of one’s nature without this loyalty of his special powers.  Nevertheless, there are times when the presiding intelligence descends into expression by a law and necessity of its own, as clouds descend into rain; and perhaps it is only then that consummate work is done.  He who by his particular powers and gifts serves as a conduit for this flowing significance may indeed toil as no drudge ever did or can, yet with such geniality and success, that he shall feel of his toil only the joy, and that we shall see of it only the prosperity.  A swan labors in swimming, a pigeon in his flight; yet as no part of this industry is defeated, as it issues momentarily in perfect achievement, it makes upon us the impression, not of the limitation of labor, but of the freedom and liberation of an animal genius.

“Long deliberations,” says Goethe, “commonly indicate that we have not the point to be determined clearly in view.”  So an extreme sense of striving effort, or, in other words, an extreme sense of inward hindrance, in the performance of a high task, usually denotes the presence in us of an element irrelevant to our work, and perhaps unfriendly to it.  If a stream flow roughly, you infer obstructions in the channel.  Often the explanation may be that one is attempting to-day a task proper to some future time,—­to another year, or another century.  It is the green fruit that clings tenaciously to the bough; the ripe falls of itself.

But as blighted and worm-eaten apples likewise fall of themselves, so in this ease of execution the falsest work may agree with the best.  That the similarity is purely specious needs not be urged; yet in practically distinguishing between the two there are not a few that fail.  The most precious work is performed with a noble, though not idle ease, because it is the sincere, seasonable, and, as it were, inevitable flowering into expression of one’s inward life; and work utterly, glibly insincere and imitative is often done with ease, because it is so successfully separated from the inward life as not even to recognize its claim.  Accordingly, pure art and pure artifice, sincere creation and sheer fabrication, flow; from the mixture of these, or from any mixture of natural and necessary with factitious expression, comes embarrassment.  In the mastery of life, or of death, there is peace; the intermediate state, that of sickness, is full of pain and struggle.  In Homer and in Tupper, in Cicero and the leaders of the London “Times,” in Jeremy Taylor and the latest Reverend Mr. Orotund, you find a liberal and privileged utterance; but honest John Foster, made of powerful, but ill-composed elements, and replete with an intelligence now gleaming and now murky, could wring statements from his mind only as testimony in cruel ages was obtained from unwilling witnesses, namely, by putting himself to the torture.