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The Gift Of Readiness

The Gift Of Readiness image
Parent Issue
Day
25
Month
September
Year
1874
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

Of all the intellectual gifts bestowed on man the most intoxicating is readiness - the power of calling all the resources of the mind into simultaneous action at a moment's notice. Nothing strikes the unready as so mirar.ulous as this promptitude in others ; nothing imprüsses hiin with so dull and envious a sense of contrast in his own person. To want readiness is to be laid on the shelf, to creep where others fly, to fall into permanent discouragement. To be ready is to have the miud's intellectual .property put out at 50 or 100 per cent. ; to be unready at the moment of trial is to be diinly conscious of faculties tied up somewhere in a napkin. What an engine- wo are speaking of " the coruinerce of mankind" - is a memory ready with its stores at the first question, words that come at your cali, thoughts that follow in unbroken sequence, reason quick at retort ! The thoughts we may fepl not above our level ; the words we could arrange in as harmonious order ; the memory, ouly to give time, does not fail us ; the repartee is all the occasion called tor, if it ouly had not suggested itself too late, thus changing its nature from a triuinph into a regret. It is such compassions, the painïul recollection of panic and disaster, the speech that would not be spoken, the roply that dissolved into incoherence, the action that belied our intention, or, it may be, experience in a hunibla field, that gives to readiness such a charm and value. The ready man does seem such a clever fellow ! The poet's readiness does not avail him tor such practical uses, and does not contribute to his fame or success at all in the same degree It is the result - the thought, the wit, the sense - not the speed of performance, which determines the worth of his efforts. But wo delight in an externpore efl'usion because of the prestige of roadiness called iuto play in busy hfe ; at least this adds to the pleasure. The poet's best verses are the greatest, least imitable wonder about him ; but we are apt to be most surprisod when he shows his powers under immediato command ; and good lines, struck off at a heat, do give us a vivid insight into the vivacity and energy of the poetical temperament, prompt in its action, ready at a cali, and gayly willing to display its rnechanioal facilities. There is a specimen of Dryden's fluency in exteinpore verse, coramunicated and authenticated by Halone, which shows that foresight and composite action which a strong imagination seems to possess, uttering what it has prepared, and composing what ia to f'oliow, at one and the same time - a habit or faculty observed in Sir TV alter Soott by his amanuensis. This doublé action must bolong to all rapid complex expression ; but the difficulty is enhanced and the feat magnifiod in proportion when rhythm and rhymo are added to the

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Subjects
Old News
Michigan Argus