"
Mr. Somerville shook his head. "This same genius," said he, "is a wild
quality that runs away with our most promising young men. It has become so
much the fashion, too, to give it the reins that it is now thought an
animal of too noble and generous a nature to be brought to harness. But it
is all a mistake. Nature never designed these high endowments to run riot
through society, and throw the whole system into confusion. No, my dear
sir, genius, unless it acts upon system, is very apt to be a useless
quality to society; sometimes an injurious, and certainly a very
uncomfortable one, to its possessor. I have had many opportunities of
seeing the progress through life of young men who were accounted geniuses,
and have found it too often end in early exhaustion and bitter
disappointment; and have as often noticed that these effects might be
traced to a total want of system. There were no habits of business, of
steady purpose, and regular application, superinduced upon the mind;
everything was left to chance and impulse, and native luxuriance, and
everything of course ran to waste and wild entanglement.
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