Mattie:—A Stray (Vol 3 of 3)

By bestowing blessings upon others, we entail them on ourselves. Horace Smith.
There are epochs in some lives when the heart cracks or hardens. When humanity, wrung to its utmost, gives way, or ossifies. Both are dangerous crises, and require more than ordinary care; the physician must be skilful and understand human nature, or his efforts at cure will only kill the patient who submits to his remedies.
Man—we speak literally of the masculine gender at this point—though born unto trouble, finds it hard to support in a philosophical way. A great trouble that in nine cases out of ten shows woman at her best, transforms man to his worst; if he be a man of the world, worldly, he is dumbfounded by the calamity which has fallen upon him. It is incomprehensible why he should suffer—he of all men—and he wraps himself in his egotism—his wounded self-love—and thinks of the injustice and hardness that have shut him out from his labours.
Such men, heavily oppressed, do not give in to the axiom, that it is well for them to be afflicted; they will not bow to God's will, or resign themselves to it—their outward calmness is assumed, and they chafe at the Great Hand which has arrested them midway. Such men will turn misanthropes and atheists, at times.
Sidney Hinchford after all was a man of the world. In the world he had lived and fought upwards. There had been a charm in making his way in it, and the obstacles ahead had but nerved his arm to resist, and his heart to endure. He had talents for success in the commercial world—even a genius for making money. With time before him, possibly Sidney Hinchford would have risen to greatness.
To make money—and to keep it when made—requires as much genius as to make poetry, rather more, perhaps. A genius of a different order, but a very fine one notwithstanding, and one which we can admire at a distance—on the kerb stones with our manuscripts under our arms, waiting for the genius's carriage to pass, before we cross to our publishers'. Is not that man a genius who in these latter days rises to wealth by his own exertions, in lieu of having wealth thrust upon him? A genius, with wondrous powers of discrimination, not to be led into a bad thing, but seeing before other people the advantages to accrue from a good one, and making his investments accordingly. A man who peers into the future and beholds his own advancement, not the step before him, but the apex in the clouds, lost to less keen-sighted folk fighting away at the base—therefore, a wonderful man.