Now suppose you wish to skate so that the critics will say, “See! this athlete docs his work as Church paints, as Darley draws, as Palmer chisels, as Wittier strikes the lyre, and Longfellow the dulcimer; he is as terse as Emerson, as clever as Holmes, as graceful as Curtis; he is as calm as Seward, as keen as Phillips, as stalwart as Beecher; be is Garibaldi, he is Kit Carson, he is Blondin; he is as complete as the steamboat Metropolis, as Steers’s yacht, as Singer’s sewing-machine, as Colt’s revolver, as the steam-plough, as Civilization.”  You wish to be so ranked among the people and things that lead the age;—­consider the qualities you must have, and while you consider, keep your eye on Richard Wade, for he has them all in perfection.

First,—­of your physical qualities.  You must have lungs, not bellows; and an active heart, not an assortment of sluggish auricles and ventricles.  You must have legs, not shanks.  Their shape is unimportant, except that they must not interfere at the knee.  You must have muscles, not flabbiness; sinews like wire; nerves like sunbeams; and a thin layer of flesh to cushion the gable-ends, where you will strike, if you tumble,—­which, once for all be it said, you must never do.  You must be all momentum, and no inertia.  You must be one part grace, one force, one agility, and the rest caoutchouc, Manila hemp, and watch-spring.  Your machine, your body, must be thoroughly obedient.  It must go just so far and no farther.  You have got to be as unerring as a planet holding its own, emphatically, between forces centripetal and centrifugal.  Your aplomb must be as absolute as the pounce of a falcon.

So much for a few of the physical qualities necessary to be a Great Artist in Skating.  See Wade, how be shows them!

Now for the moral and intellectual.  Pluck is the first;—­it always is the first quality.  Then enthusiasm.  Then patience.  Then pertinacity.  Then a fine aesthetic faculty,—­in short, good taste.  Then an orderly and submissive mind, that can consent to act in accordance with the laws of Art.  Circumstances, too, must have been reasonably favorable.  That well-known skeptic, the King of tropical Bantam, could not skate, because he had never seen ice and doubted even the existence of solid water.  Widdrington, after the Battle of Chevy Chace, could not have skated, because he had no legs,—­poor fellow!

But granted the ice and the legs, then if you begin in the elastic days of youth, when cold does not sting, tumbles do not bruise, and duckings do not wet; if you have pluck and ardor enough to try everything; if you work slowly ahead and stick to it; if you have good taste and a lively invention; if you are a man, and not a lubber;—­then, in fine, you may become a Great Skater, just as with equal power and equal pains you may put your grip on any kind of Greatness.

The technology of skating is imperfect.  Few of the great feats, the Big Things, have admitted names.  If I attempted to catalogue Wade’s achievements, this chapter might become an unintelligible rhapsody.  A sheet of paper and a pen-point cannot supply the place of a sheet of ice and a skate-edge.  Geometry must have its diagrams, Anatomy its corpus to carve.  Skating also refuses to be spiritualized into a Science; it remains an Art, and cannot be expressed in a formula.