GENIUS.

When Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when

young Colburn gives _impromptu_ solution to a mathematical problem

involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder: such

power is separated by the very extent of it from our mental operations.

But when we further observe that these feats are attended by little or

no fatigue,--that this is the play, not the tension of faculty, we

recognize a new kind, not merely a new degree, of intelligence. These

men seem to leap, not labor step by step, to their results. Colburn sees

the complication of values, Morphy that of moves, as we see the relation

of two and two. What is multiform and puzzling to us is simple to them,

as the universe lies rounded and is one thought in the Original Mind. We

seek in vain for the secret of this mastery. It is private,--as deeply

hidden from those who have as from those who have it not. They cannot

think otherwise than so, and to this exercise have been provoked by

every influence in life. The boy who is an organized arithmetic and

geometry will count all the hills of potatoes and reckon the kernels of

corn in a bushel, and his triangles soon begin to cover the barn-door.

He sees nothing but number and dimension; he feeds on these, another

fellow on apples and nuts. But his brother loves application of force,

builds wheels and mills; his head is full of cogs and levers and

eccentrics; and after he has gone out to his engineering in the great

machine-shop of a modern world, the old corn-chamber at home is lumbered

with his mysterious contrivances, studies for a self-impelling or

gravitating machine and perpetual motion. Another boy is fired with the

mystery of form. He will draw the cat and dog; his chalk and charcoal

are on all our elbows; he carves a ram's head on his bat, an eagle on a

walking-stick, perches a cock on top of the barn, puts an eye and a nose

to every triangle of the geometer, and paints faces on the wheels of his

mechanical brother. In all these boys there is something more than

ability; there is propensity, an attraction irresistible. Their minds

run, we say, in that direction, and they creep or lie still, if turned

in another. The young shepherd will toss eggs, spin platters, and

balance knives, year after year, in solitude, with a patient energy and

endurance able to command any fortune.

What philter is in these faculties? The boy who will be great is always

discontented with his work, ready to rub out and begin again. He follows

a bee, and never quite touches that which drew him on. Plainly, the mere

ability to do is a dry straw, but through it our seeker tastes an

intoxicating, seductive liquor, from which he cannot take away his lips.

It is the liquor of our life. In measure, or form, or tone, he applies

himself to the very breasts of Nature, and draws through these exteriors

a motherly milk which was her blood and hastens to be his own. If the

young cub holds fast to the teat, be sure the stream flows and his veins

swell. Matter is the dry rind of this succulent, nutritious universe:

prick it on any side, and you draw the same juice. Varieties of

endowment are only so many pitchers dipped in one stream. Poet, painter,

musician, mathematician, the gift is an accident of organization, the

result is admission to that by which all things are, and by partaking

which we become what we must be.

Of this experience there can be no adequate report. It is as though one

should attempt to go up in a balloon above the atmosphere and bring down

the ether in his hands. There is a spring on every door in Nature to

close it behind the returning footsteps of her lover, so that he can

lead no man freely into the chamber where she gave him love; it is only

by the confidence, fervency, and reverence of the initiate that we learn

in what presence he has been. Genius is great, but no product of genius

is more than a shadow which points to this sun behind the sun as its

substance, and the power of our inspired men has been merely manifested,

not rightly employed. Genius has availed only to authenticate itself as

the normal activity of man, not yet to do the work of the world.

Sense is a tangle of contradiction. The boy throws wood on water and it

floats; then he throws in his new knife and it sinks. How was he to know

that the same force will lift a stick and swallow a knife? He throws a

feather after his knife, and away it swims on the wind. That is another

brook, then, in which the feather is a stick and the stick a stone. Not

only are results of a single law opposed, but the laws pull one this

way, one that, as gravitation contends with currents of water and air.

If we could be shut in sense and surface, Nature would seem a game of

cross-purposes, every creature devouring another. The beast eats plant

and beast; he dies, and the plant eats him again; fire, water, and

frost, in their old quarrel, destroy whatever they build; the night eats

the day, summer the snow, and winter the green. Change is a revolving

wheel, in which so many spokes rise, so many fall, a motion returning

into itself. Nature is a circle, but man a spiral. No wonder he is

dissatisfied, with his longing to get on. Eating and hunger, labor and

rest, gathering and spending, there is no gain. Life is consumed in

getting a living. After laborious years our money is ready in bank, but

the man who was to enjoy it is gone from enjoyment, shrivelled with

care, every appetite dried up. So learning devastates the scholar, is

another plague of wealth, and our goodness turns out to be a hasty

mistake. Is order disorder, then? Are we fools of fate? Is there only

power enough to prop up this rickety old system, to keep it running and

hold our noses to the grindstone? No man believes it: the madness of

Time has method only half concealed.

See what eagerness is in the eyes of men, curious, hopeful, dimly aware

of beneficence under all these knocks and denials. There are whispers of

a great destiny for man,--that he is dear to the Cause. We suspect

integrity in Nature. Can this canebrake, in which we are tangled with

care, fear, and sin, be after all single and sincere, a piece of

intelligent kindness? Genius is the opening of this suspicion to

certainty. We are like children who recognize the love which gives them

sugar-plums, but not that which shuts the bag and forbids. Insight goes

deep enough to prize all severity and detect the good of evil.

Trade seems contemptible to Wilhelm Meister, but, in its larger aspect,

sublime to Werner, who sees it as an exploration and possession of

Nature with friendly interchange between man and man. Trade is

democracy. Authority is hateful to democrats; but Carlyle can justify

loyalty, and show how obedience to the hero may be fidelity to myself.

Every experience needs its interpreter, one who can show its derivation

from an absolute centre. The mob of the French Revolution is a crowd of

devils till their poet arrives and restores these maniacs to manhood.

They are misguided brothers, doing what we should do in their place.

Genius in every situation takes hold on reality, a tap-root going down

to the source. Equilibrium appears in a staggering as well as a standing

figure, and is perfectly restored in every fall. The landscape seen in

detail is broken and ragged,--here a raw sand-bank, there a crooked

butternut-tree, yonder a stiff black cedar: but look with a larger eye;

the straight is complement to the crooked tree, color balances color,

form corrects form, and the entire effect of every scene is

completeness. The artist restores this harmony broken by our microscopic

view. Music is a shattering and suspension of chords till we ache for

their resolution; and the music of life is desire, a diminished seventh

that melts the past and ruins the present to prepare a future in another

key.

Genius sees that many an exception is fruit of some larger law, is not

imperfection, but uncomprehended perfection. Is there, then, no

imperfection? We are haunted by such a thought. We see first a mixed

beauty in faces, partly life and partly organization; the body is never

symmetrical, deformity is the rule. But beauty will not be measured by

form; the body cannot long occupy good eyes; we begin to look through

that, and encounter some courage, generosity, or tenderness, a dawning

or dominant light in every countenance. This is our morning, and the

physical form only a low shore over which it breaks. Beauty is the rule,

exceptions melt away. There is no face in which Raphael cannot see more

than I see in any face; the dullest landscape is to Turner a fairer

vision than I can find in the world; Byron in his blackguards shows a

kind of magnanimity which refreshes the victims of respectability and

routine. The individuality of men is deformity, a departure from the

human type; yet this fault makes each necessary to each, founds society,

love, and friendship. So wherever a break appears in the plan, we

anticipate a larger purpose, and sound down through the water, certain

to find under that also a continuation of land. Genius first named our

system a universe to mark its consistency, and goes on reconciling,

showing how creatures and men are made of one stuff and that not so bad.

Let the thing be what it may, press on it a little with the mind, and

order begins to ooze. There is nothing on which we cannot feed with good

enough teeth and digestion, for the elements of meat are given also in

brick and bark. Natural objects are explored to their roots in man, and

through him in the Cause: each is what it is in kindness to him, has its

soul in his breast, grows out of him as truly as his hair, and the

out-world is only a larger body shaped by his needs. Each thing is a

passive man, and personification does no more than justice to the

joint-stool and the fence or whatever creature talks and suffers in

verse.

What is the meaning of my day and relations? I suspect an advantage

designed for me, but not yet extracted, in marriage and the family-life,

in books, in politics, in business, in the garden, in music. How much of

each, as I know them, is chaff? how much is life coming in from the deep

by these low doors? What is society? An eating and drinking together? a

bit of gossip? a volley of jokes? Do men meet in these exercises, or in

hope and humanity? We are all superior to amusement. The cowardly host

will entertain with fiddlers and cream; then every guest leaves his

high desire with his hat, leaves himself behind, and descends to

fiddlers and cream. But men rise to associate; in sinking they separate;

and the good host must call us up, not drag us down to his feast. Goethe

knows how to spread the table with portfolios, architecture, music,

drawing, tableaux; but a great love, with its inevitable thought, makes

even these solvents superfluous. Goethe studies the cemetery, the

chapel, the school, the gallery, the burial-service, the

estate,--whatever is nearest. He finds astonishing values in labor,

trade, production, art, science, war. In his boyhood he built an altar

with his playthings and burned incense to Deity on a pile of shells and

stones. That act of worship foreshadowed his whole career; he took every

creature and thing from God's hand with reverent expectation, and never

rested till he had opened to some intent of the Maker therein. Things,

therefore, in his view are no longer empty and hollow like old cast-off

shoes, but pieces of sublime design. A beetle is sustained by earth,

air, fire, and water, needs the sun and the sea, winter and summer,

earth's orbit and parallax, needs whatever has been made, to set him on

his legs. He carries the world in little, and is a creeping black body

of the best.

Much more man is microcosmic and macrocosmic. Natural and supernatural

meet concealedly in the out-world, but openly in him, and his early

desires grow into a future surpassing all desire. The poet sees his

destiny in our wishes,--sees right and wrong, kindness and greediness,

deepening into incalculable grandeurs of heaven and hell. He sees the

man never yet arrived, but now arriving, to inhabit each breast. "Far

off his coming" shines. We have many little gleams of generosity; we

have conviction, and can strike for the right. Nature is a fixed

quantity, a solid; but life is reinforced by life. Truth begets truth,

love kindles love, every end is a new beginning.

Therefore the perception of genius is prophetic,--an anticipation of

manhood for this boy, who is the King's son, child of Eternity, and only

changeling of Time. Wherever any magnanimity is revealed, I lay claim to

it. The courage of heroes, the purity of angels, the generosity of God,

is no more than I need. Only show virtue unmixed at the heart of this

system, and you open my destiny in that. If there be but the least spark

of pure benignity, it is a fire will spread through all and fill the

breast; for Good makes good, and what it is I must become. Man is heir

not to any possession or commodity, though it were a homestead in all

heavens, but to the moral power which we ache to exercise. To-day I am a

poor starveling of Nature, sucking many a dry straw, but so sure as God

I shall stream like the sun. The meanest creature is a promise of such

power, for in each is some radiation as well as suction. Man grows,

indeed, faster than he can be filled, and so is forever empty; but if

power is never a _plenum_, it is never drawn dry, and at least the

mantling foam of it fills the cup. Our expectation is that bead on the

draught of being, and boils over the brim.

Imagination is the spiritual sight, working upward from the fact,

downward from the law. In low experience it divines the tendency of

order, and descends on the other arc of this rainbow to construct the

world, and the man that must be. Imagination is the projection of each

beyond himself. A man shall not lift his meat to his lips without

prophecy and a consulting of this oracle: he shall first extend him to

think the savor and satisfaction of the meat. Shut into the horizon and

the moment, we have this only organ of communication with all that is

beyond; yet having here in rudiments and beginnings all that is beyond,

we laugh at the old limits, and explore the universe through every

dimension, through spaces beyond Space and times beyond Time.

If this old ball on which we are carried be no apple of Sodom, but sound

and sweet to the core, insight must be confidence and satisfaction. In

the beginning of thought we enjoy mere glimpses and guesses, our hopes

are rather wishes than hopes; we mount into flame when they come, we

sink into ashes when they burn out and desert us. The first glimmerings

only beget a noble discontent. Children are tired of matter before they

know where to seek their own power; they seem to be cheated of

themselves, their worthiness is unrecognized and unfed. Companions,

tasks, prospects are insufficient, they are bored and isolated, they

sigh and mope; yet they are proud of this lukewarm longing, which does

not quite avail, and keep diaries to record with protest the dulness of

every day. Sentimentality is initial genius. Its complaint seems to

contradict the cheerfulness of wisdom, yet it enjoys complaining; though

life be not worth having on these conditions, it bottles every tear. A

weak sadness fills great space in literature, stocks the circulating

library, and counts its Werthers by the thousand in every age. Now we

expect this malady, as we look for mumps and measles in the growing

child. It is feminine,--unwilling to be weak, yet not able to stand and

go. The strong quickly leave it behind.

In his first novel Goethe burned out for himself this girlish

green-sickness, and by a more vigorous demand began to take what he

wanted from the world. To the young, life seems splendid but

inaccessible. Its remoteness is the theme of every complaint; but when

these windy wishes grow stern, inexorable, when a man will no longer

beg, but gets on his feet to try a tussle with the world, he throws

resolute arms around the Greatest, and finds in his bosom all that was

so vast and so far.

Then we open paths, renew our society, enlarge our work, make elbow-room

and head-room enough in the world. Criticism is the shadow of the mind.

Insight is not sadness, but invigoration,--is no sob or spasm, but

clearness in the eye and calmness in the breast. We misjudge it from

partial examples: the light of day is confidence, yet sudden bursts of

light distress and blind. The poet is rapt, and follows thought; he

leaves his meat, and by some transubstantiation feeds on the wind; he no

longer sees the pillars of Hercules on a sixpence; he is mad for the

hour, if a majority shall say what is madness. Meanwhile his field is

unploughed; and if he falls from this ecstasy, look to see an harassed,

embittered man. The birds sing as they pick up the corn, but wisdom is

not so quickly convertible into meal, and if he cannot feed always on

it, let him never seek the Muse. Our poor half-genius vibrates miserably

between truth and the dinner-pot, comes back from his apocalypse, and

cries for admiration, gold-lace, hair-powder, and wine. That is no

apocalypse from which a man returns to whine and beg. Burns complains of

Scotland and poverty, Byron of England and respectability, and they are

both so far paupers unfed at home. Wordsworth finds London a wilderness,

and goes more than content to good company in lonely Cumberland, to eat

a crust and drink water with the gods. Socrates is barefooted. He has

one want so pressing that he can have no other want, and has set his

lips to a cup which hides his bare feet from his eyes: with a single

garment for winter and summer, he draws the universe around him a

garment for the mind.

If the first flashes of perception dazzle, they are rays of daylight to

one emerging from the cave of sense. The eye becomes wonted to truth,

and that is now the least of his convictions which yesterday struck Paul

from his horse, and rebuked him as fire from the sky. Truth is breath,

and only for the first uncertain moment of life we use it to cry and

complain. Inspiration is morning, not a flash to deepen the dark.

Popular literature is some description of a state which men think they

might enjoy: it is no record of joy. But the fool's paradise would be

dreary even for the fool; he is his own paradise, and will be. Our

early fancy is no transcript of the divine method, and is sternly

rejected by all who suspect a perfection hidden in the day. A few works

are great which celebrate the charm of actual effort, and the

furtherance of Nature for the brave. Homer, Shakspeare, Goethe, need

never exaggerate or leave the earth behind: in their experience it

carries well the sky. Every vital thought is some pleasure in running,

waking, loving, contending, helping,--is valor dealing gayly with the

homely old forces and needs. The marrow is sweet for him who can crack

it, in the roughest or the smoothest bone. One is born with a key to the

gladness of Nature, and glows with the day's work, the touch of hands,

the prospect of to-morrow,--love's production and husbandry, the old

worn grass and sunshine, the winter wind, the games and squabbles of

children and of men. Why is life for John weariness, for James every

moment fresh fire out of the sky? He who finds what he wants, or makes

what he wants, is a god. I know well the hope of saints and sages, how

they connect this life with endless stages beyond, how they look for the

same dignity in all action, the same motive in every companion; I see

what they have signified by heaven, a state wherein the best loved is

the best: but we must not be scornful, or miss to-day the common delight

of living, the moderate hopes of the healthy multitude. For no

exceptional joy is so wonderful as the universality of joy, the love of

life under every burden and stroke. The beginning of all beatitude and

ground of all is good digestion, good sleep, good-nature, and the cheer

undeniable of an average human day.

But genius hurries on to expand our hope and dread to incalculable

dimensions. Hell is its first sudden down-look from uncertain flight, is

earth and animalty seen from the sky. The bad neither so see nor fear.

Few men ever reach a height from which they can sound such depth, and

the popular talk is repetition without corresponding experience. Hope

and fear rise alike to sublimity before the boundless scope of our

future. Give the hour to folly, and you set back the dial-hand of

destiny, you are so much behind your privilege in every following hour.

Eternity is displaced by the stumbling present as the earth by a falling

pebble, and the act of this low morning is a stone cast in the sea of

universal Being, which shakes and shoulders every drop of the deep. The

immensity of the universe does not dwarf, but magnifies our activity:

man is multiplied into the sum of all. This deed, this breath dilates to

the proportions of Spirit, and upheaves the low roof of Time, which is

no sky for the soul. Life becomes awful by its reaches: its span from

zenith to nadir, by moral parallax. From gods we sound down to beasts

and devils, from sky and fire to ice and mud. Here are the true and

final spaces: in their startling contrast appears the grandeur of the

moral law, like Chimborazo carrying all zones. It offers hell and

heaven, advancing inevitable, and leaves us never a dodge from choice.

Our dodge is a choice. Man overtaken by inexorable need must do or go

under in the tread-mill of Fate. Not a fault, not a lack, but is so far

damnation, with consequences not to be set forth in any prospect of

fire. When you begin to look down, the fear of centuries seems not

exaggerated. The remedy is in looking so vigorously and far as to see,

beyond depth, again the sky and stars. Look through; for toward that

centre which is everywhere, we look. Hell was situated under the earth;

our first voyage teaches that there is no under-the-earth. The widening

of every path gives boundless dimension to sin, till we learn that the

evil impulse alone does not extend. It is soon exhausted both in

attraction and effect,--is no power, but some suspense of life.

The first moral perception is always a shudder. Carlyle sees the lifted

judgment of a lie; his eye is filled, and he sees nothing beyond; but

Nemesis is surgeon with probe and knife. Our poisons are medicines and

homoeopathic, the fumes of fear a remedy of sulphur for cutaneous sin.

The thought in which our terrors arrive is always at last a gospel, is

glad tidings. Dante, Paul, Swedenborg, Edwards have seen the pit. It

opens only in the holiness of such men,--is a thunder out of clear sky,

before which generations of the impure, like brute beasts, tremble and

cower. An equal moral genius will see that the ascension of an immortal

Love has left behind this vacuum, mitigated, not deepened, by the

furniture of devils and their flame. Men strive in vain to be afflicted

by a revelation of the best and worst. The mind is naturally a form of

gladness, and every window in us takes the sun. Our genuine trouble is

not extreme dread, but a perpetual restlessness and discontent.

The delight of contemplation has been in history a height without

sustaining breadth, a needle, not a cube. Genius has been tremulous,

recluse,--has been cherished in solitude with Nature,--has been a

feminine partiality among men, holding for gods its favorites, for dogs

the refuse of mankind. It still counts the practical life an

interruption. It is therefore only melancholy cheer, a forlorn ark with

nine souls on the brine, a refuge from the world, not a delight of the

world. It lives not from God who is, but from a God who should be. The

true creative power is a calm of battle, a trust not for the closet, but

the chariot, a torch that can be carried through the gusty market, a

Ramadhan in the street. It is no miracle to be calm in calm, to be quiet

in bed,--but to rule and lead without anxiety, to tame the beasts and

elements, to build and unbuild cities with a song. The great thought

returns on society, floods out the heaped rubbish of custom, pours the

old grandeurs of Nature through dry channels of Trade, Religion,

Courtesy, and Art. He is great who plays the game of life with decision,

yet is always retired, and holds the life of life in reserve. Such a man

is demiurgic, for he puts down a hand on action through the sky.

From a happy or sufficient genius came the golden maxim, "Think of

living." Strong men love life. The system, so cheery and severe, seems

to them worthy to be continued yonder and without end. This day leading

a better, itself good not leading alone,--this presentiment,--this solid

increment of hard-won power,--of what other stuff should our eternity be

woven? In wisdom first appears the present tense, an hour which is not

mere transition, but something for itself. There are men who live--to

live. He who finds our destiny given beforehand in the nature of things

has the leisure of God: he has not only all the time that is, but spaces

beyond, so that he will not be hurried by the falling-off of Time.

Leisure is a regard fixed not on the nearest trees and fences as we

whirl through this changing scene, but on remoter and larger objects, on

the slow-revolving circle of the far hills, on the quiet stars. Why

should I hasten with my foolish plan? Prosperity is over all, not in my

foolish plan. What is a fortune, a reputation,--what even genuine

influence, if you consider the future of one or of the race? Only little

aims bring care. Why run after success? That is success which follows:

success should be cosmic, a new creation, not any trick or feat. To be

man is the only success. For this we lie back grandly with total

application to the cause. Why run after knowledge? A large mind circles

all the primal facts from its own stand-point, and needs never tread the

curious round of science, history, and art. Where it is, is Nature:

therefore it is calm and free. The wise men of my knowledge were

farmers, drovers, traders, learned beyond the book. You cannot feed but

you put me in communication with all forests, fields, streams, seas.

Give me one companion, and between us two is quickly repeated the

history of the race. In a plant, an animal, a day or year, in elements,

their feuds and fruitful marriages, in a private or public history, the

thinker is admitted to the end of thought. A scholar can add nothing to

my perfect wonder, though he bring Egypt, Assyria, and Greece. I find

myself where I was, in Egypt, Assyria, and Greece: I find the old

earth, the old sky, the old astonishment of man. Cæsar and the

grasshopper, both are alike within my knowledge and beyond. There is

some vague report of a remote divine, at which he will smile who finds

no least escape from the divine. Two points are given in every regard,

man and the world, subject, we say, and object, a creature seen and a

creature seeing, marvelling, knowing, ignorant. Either of these openings

will lead quickly to light too pure for our organs, and launch us on the

sea beyond every shore. The artist studies a fair face; there is no

supplement to his delight. In temples, statues, pictures, poems,

symphonies, and actions, only the same eternal splendor shines. It is

the sun which lights all lands,--"that planet," as Dante sings,

"Which leads men straight on every road."

He is delivered there at home to Beauty, which makes and is the world.

Genius is royal knowledge. In the nearest need it studies all ages and

all worlds. Let me understand my neighbors and my meat; you may have the

libraries and schools. I read here living languages,--the eye, the

attitude and temperament, the wish and will: Hebrew and Greek must wait.

He who knows how to value "Hamlet" will never subscribe for your picture

of "Shakspeare's Study." Great intelligence runs quickly through our

primers, our cities, constitutions, galleries, traditions, cathedrals,

creeds. The long invention of the race is a tortuous, obscure way. Must

I creep all my fresh years in that labyrinth, and postpone youth to the

end of age? What need of so much experience and contrivance, if without

contrivance, if by simplicity, the children surely and beautifully live?

Healthy thought is organic, grows by assimilation, vitalizes all it

takes, and so like a plant puts forth knowledge from the old and from

within. The apple of to-morrow is earth, not apple, till it hangs on the

tree. Our knowing seems rather rejection than acceptance, so much is

husk in bulk. From eight thousand miles of geology the tree takes a few

drops of water and distils from these its own again. Vigor of mind is

judgment, which divides the meat from the shell, that which cumbers from

that which thrills. The act is simple, inevitable; let it be energetic

and final. We say, "This is valuable, it quickens me; the rest is

nonsense." A feeble mind needs now chiefly to be rid of rubbish, of

cheap admirations, an awe before the hair-pins and shoe-ties of society,

before the true church, the scholastic learning, dead languages, the

Fathers and the fashion. To set the savage of civilization free from his

superstition, these idols must be insulted before his face.

A little energy of demand displaces them from regard. The scholars are

busy with punctuation, chronology, and the lives of the little great, so

that their visit is a vastation, and I must turn them out of doors.

Genius will continue unable to spell, to read the German, to count the

Egyptian kings. There is royal ignorance, the preoccupation of gods. For

the wise, if no object is trifling, yet part of every object is foreign

to its best intent. Every nut is inwardly a man and a miracle, but

outwardly a shell. If it be a book, the thought is a shell, though God

be in the thought. The book is another thing, another world of power and

form, and the power will consume the form as a sword eats its sheath,

the soul the body, or fire the pan. The letter drops, for the spirit

must expand and be set free. The positive and negative poles of Nature

reappear in every creature, and the positive element must prevail. When

we have learned to live, we shall--or shall not--learn to spell.

The last refreshment is intercourse with a kingly mind, which has no

need to shift its centre, but lies abroad hemispheric, and sleeps like

sunshine, bathing silently the earth and sky. Such a mind is at home,

not in position, but in a vital relation to Nature, which leaves no

spaces dark and cold for wandering, and knows no change that is worth

the name of change. It is rest to be with one who is at rest, who

cannot go to or go from his happiness, for whom the meaning of Deity is

here and now. What stillness and depth of manner are communicated to all

who sound the deeps of life! what a refuge is their society from wit,

zeal, and gossip, from petty estimates and demands! To these, now first

encountered, we have been always known; in them we meet no private

motive, no accomplishment, reputation, ability, immediate haunting

purpose, but a Sabbath from personal fortunes. We meet the great above

all that can be mine or thine, above gifts and accidents in common

manhood and prosperity. Swedenborg reports no encounter on higher

ground. The seven heavens open to me in a mind which gives rank to its

own facts, and wherever it is housed still finds the universe only a

larger body around the soul.

Genius declares the total or representative value of its own facts

against the neglect or contempt of mankind. Intelligence is centre of

centres, and all things diminish as they recede from the eye. Every

natural law is some hint to us of our commanding position. The good

thought is never a toilsome going abroad, but some settling at home to

new intimacy with the fortune which waits on all. It is no putting out

legs, but a putting down roots to take possession of the earth and the

nether heavens, while we fill the upper sky with climbing shoots.

Intelligence is at one with the system, able to entertain it as a unit,

to refer every particle, dark as a particle, to its shining place in the

transparent whole. How can I afford to drop my errand, to go wonder

after the fore-world, after Plato, Washington, or Paul? These are men

who never dropped their errands to go wonder after the Maker himself.

They found God in the thing lying nearest to be done. As right action in

the remotest corner is a world-victory, so right thought applied to the

lowest circumstance is cosmic thought. In the fortune of the hour we

have a home beyond the fortune of the hour. The least circle of order

now organized and established in our lives is not a poor house frozen to

the ground, but a ship able to outride the currents of time, a charmed

circle of security which will serve us still in every following world.

Our future is to be found, not in multiplication of examples, but in

deeper sympathy with all we have superficially known.

We shall never rightly celebrate the stillness and sweetness of truth in

an open mind. Clear perception is refreshing as sleep. It is a sleep

from blunder, care, and sin. In every thought we are lifted to sit with

the serene rulers, and see how lightly, yet firmly, in their orbits the

worlds are borne. With insight we work freely, for every result is

secure; we rest, for every stream will bear us to the sea. Peace is joy

beyond the perturbation of joy, is entertainment of Omnipotence in the

breast.

A filial relation to the universe is well expressed, not in speech, but

in the attitudes of her children, in their balance, tranquillity,

directness, their firm and quiet grasp, look, step, tone. Confidence and

joy are the only moral agents. Worship is immortal cheer. The Greeks

rebuke us with their sacred festivals and games: why should we not hunt

every evil as we follow gayly the buffalo and bear? Virtue cannot be

wrinkled and sad; Virtue is a joy of the Right added to our earliest

joy,--is refreshment and health, not fever. The Etruscan are right

religious sculptures: the body will be more, not less, when the soul is

most; for the body is created and perfected, not devoured by the soul.

In another Eden the curves of grace and power will reappear; every

wrinkle will be counted sin; goodness will be sap and blood, a growth of

grapes and roses, a sacrament of energy and content.

If there be great wrongs, we cannot distrust the Maker, and postpone the

security of the soul. Impatience is a wrong as great as any. Love and

trust are remedies for wrong. Music is our cure for insanity, and I

remember that incantation of fair reasons which Plato prescribed. What

gain is in scolding and knitting the brows? The blue sky, the bright

cloud, the star of night, the star of day, every creature is in its

smiling place a protest of the universe against our hasty method of

counter-working wrong with wrong. Let loose the Right. Go forward with

martial music; never await or seek, but carry victory and win every

battle in the organization of your band. Hear Beethoven:--"Nor do I fear

for my works. No evil can befall them, and whosoever shall understand

them shall be free from all such misery as burdens mankind."

From this security in the lap of Nature, this nest in the grass, we rise

easily to every height. Gladness becomes uncontainable, a pain of

fulness, for which, after all effort, there is no complete relief; for

language breaks under it in delivery, and Art falls to the ground. The

psalm of David, the statue of Angelo, the chorus of Handel, are

inarticulate cries. These men have not justified to us their confidence.

It will be shared, not justified. They have divined what they cannot

orderly publish, and their meaning will be by the same greatness divined

again. The work of such men remains a haunting, commanding enigma to

following ages. They do but repeat the promise and obscurity of Nature,

for she herself has the same largeness, is such another _raptus_,

proceeding to no end, but to a circle or complexity of ends. Men are

again and again divided over the images of Paul, of Plato, of Dante,

unable to escape from their authority, more unable to give them final

interpretation. They leave Nature, to puzzle over the inexhaustible

book. What does it mean? What does it not mean? The poet will never wait

till he can demonstrate and explain. He must hasten to convey a blessing

greater than explanation, to publish, if it were only by broken hints,

by signs and dumb pointing, his sense of a presence not to be

comprehended or named.

For, if the seer is sustained, he is also commanded by what he sees.

Genius is not religious, but religion, an opening to the conscience of

the universe no less than to the joy. From this original the moral,

intellectual, and æsthetic sense will each derive a conscience, and rule

with equal sovereignty the man. Through an ant or an angel the first

influx of reality is entertained in an attitude of worship, and the

poet, in his vision, cries with Virgil to Dante:--

"Down, down, bend low

Thy knees! behold God's angel! fold thy hands!

Henceforward shalt thou see true ministers!"

Revelation is not more a new light than a new heart and will; revelation

to me is the conquest and renewal of me. What is lovely will not be

encountered without love, the Creator holds the key to the creature,

Order and Right may freely enter to be man. He who can open any object

to its source is touched therein by the finger of God, and insight is

inevitable consecration. Give the coward a suspicion of our human

destiny, and he is no longer coward; he would gladly be cut in pieces

and burned in any flame to shed abroad that light. Life has such an

irresistible tendency to extend, that it makes of the man a mere

vehicle, takes him for hands and feet, wheels and wings: he is glad only

when the truth runs and prevails. Enthusiasm, devotion, earnestness are

names for this possession of the deep thinker by his thought. He lives

in that, and has in it his prosperity, no longer in the flesh. The

inspired man becomes great by absorption in a great design; he is

preoccupied, and trifles, for which other men are bought and sold, shine

before him as beads of glass with which savages are wheedled. We drop

our playthings, our banks and coaches, crowns, swords, colleges, and

sugar-plums in a heap together, when any moment opens to us the scope of

our activity, and carries far forward the curve through which we have

already run.

The divine authority of Genius is given in this descent and superiority

to will. That which in me I must obey, that also above me all men must

obey. Will is the centre of the practical man, of all force, not moral,

but brute or natural, and is identified in the common thought with

myself, as I am a natural cause. Will is the sum of physical forces

necessary for self-preservation, is reagency against the formidable

rivalry of every other organization. In this animal centre the laws are

carried up, as reins are gathered to be put into the hands of a driver,

and being tied in a knot just where the physical touches the celestial

sphere, they seem to be moral, and Will much more than the body is in

popular thought inseparable from man. It is an organ into which he has

thrown himself in reckless neglect of his privilege, a grasping hand

which rules the world as we see it ruled, masters and takes to itself

for extension all laws below its own level, wields Nature as an

instrument, breaks down a weaker will, and carries away the material

mind until some God from above shall deliver it. Will is that living

Fate of which exterior necessity is but the form. From it we are

instantly delivered in conviction, and find it ever after the servant,

not the synonyme of man.

The boy does not choose, neither does the belly choose for him, what

object shall be supremely beautiful in his eyes. He has not resolved to

see only this splendor of color, and neglect sound,--or to give himself

to sound alone, and shut his eyes to sight. If the divine order reaches

any mind, those creatures in which it appears will haunt that mind, will

take lordly their own place, and hang as constellations high overhead in

thought. So long as he can turn the eye hither and thither, or lightly

determine what he will see, the man is conversant with form alone, and

bigots who are on that plane of experience identify him with choice,

hold thought to be altogether voluntary, and burn the thinker, as though

his view were a fruit, not a root, of him. But truth is that which does

not wait for our making, but makes us,--does not lie like water at the

bottom of our wells, but comes like sunshine flooding the air, and

compelling recognition. "To believe your own thought," says a master,

"that is genius"; but is not genius primarily the arrival of a thought

able to authenticate itself, to compel trust, and make its own value

known against the sneers or anger of the world? From my own thought once

reached there is but one appeal,--to my own thought: from Philip sober

to Philip more sober.

The good spirit appears as a spark in our embers, and draws out these

careful hands to ward itself from every gust,--sets our tasks and crowns

them. We know that from first desire to last performance wisdom is

altogether a grace. Wisdom is this wish for wisdom, already given in the

readiness to receive. We have not cared for it, but it has cared for us.

Grown stronger, it is a guide, and needs none. Turner sees what he must

love; there is no rule for such seeing: what he does not love is hid

from him; there is no rule for such omission. It is in the eye, not more

a happy opening than a happy closing. A private ordinance, dividing man

into men, makes the same creature a wall to one, an open door to his

neighbor. The value of man appears to Scott in feudalism, to Wordsworth

in contemplation, to Byron in impatience, to Kant in certainty, to

Calvin in authority, to Calame in landscape, to Newton in measure, to

Carlyle in retribution, to Shakspeare in society, to Dante in the

contrast of right and wrong.

One man by grandeur sees mountains in the coals of his grate; another by

gentleness only sunshine and grasses on Monadnock. You will not say that

he chooses, but that he is chosen so to see. Light opens the eye without

our intention, and we are at no trouble to paint on the retina what must

there appear. Success is fidelity to that which must appear. Weak men

discuss forever the laws of Art, and contrive how to paint, questioning

whether this or that element should have emphasis or be shown. If there

is any question, there will be no Art. The man must feel to do, and

what he does from overmastering feeling will convince and be forever

right. The work is organic which grows so above composition or plan.

After you are engaged by the symphony, there is no escape, no pause;

each note springs out of each as branch from branch of a tree. It could

be no otherwise; it cannot be otherwise conceived. Why could not I have

found this sequence inevitable, as well as another? Plainly, the

symphony was discovered, not made,--was written before man, like

astronomy in the sky.

Only the mastery of one who is mastered by Nature will control and

renovate mankind. It is easy to recognize the habit of conviction,

freedom from within, and personal motive, the man bending himself as for

life or death to show exactly what he sees. The inspired man we know who

appeals to a divine necessity, and says, "I can do no otherwise; God be

my help! amen!"--for whom praise and property and comfortable

continuance on this planet are trifles, so great an object has opened to

him in the inviolable moral law.

Every perception takes hold at last on duty as well as desire, claims

and carries away the man entire, though it were to danger or death. The

system, grown friendly, has grown sacred also; departure from it is

shame and guilt, as well as loss. An artist, therefore, like the Greek,

is busy with portraits of the gods, and every celebration of Beauty is

another Missa Solemnis, Te Deum, and Gloria.

Whatever object becomes transparent to a man will be his medium of

communication with the Maker and with mankind. He hurries to show

therein what he has seen, as children run for their companions and point

their discoveries. These are his unsolicited angels, higher above his

reach than above that of the crowd; for every good thought is more a

surprise to the thinker than to any other. The seer points always from

himself as a telescope to the sky; he is no creator, but a bit of broken

glass in the sun. What is any man in the presence of haunting

Perfection, never to be shown without mutilation and dishonor? Is it

ours? In Him we live and move.

While the Ego is pronounced and fills consciousness, man seems to be and

do somewhat of himself; but when the universal Soul is manifest above

will, his eyes turn away from that old battery; he is absorbed in what

he sees,--forgets himself, his deeds, wants, gains. He is rapt; stands

like Socrates a day and a night in contemplation; sits like Newton for

twelve hours half dressed on the edge of his bed, arrested in rising. He

is that madman to the world who neglects his meat, postpones his private

enterprise, regards honor and comfort as so much interruption to this

commerce with reality. We are all tired of property which is exclusion,

of goods which must be taken from another to serve me. Good should grow

with sharing,--more for me when all is given. In the spirit there are no

fences, boxes, or bags.

Presenting truth, I declare it as freely yours as mine. Every act of

genius proclaims that the highest gift is no monopoly or singularity, no

privilege of one, but the birthright of the race. Shakspeare knows well

that we shall easily see what he sees; he considers it no secret. We are

always feeling beforehand for every right word now about to be spoken in

the world; many men give tokens of the general habit of thought before

he is born who clearly knows what all were dreaming. Wisdom has only

gone before us on our own path, and we overtake our guide in every

perception. Yet we are lifted quite off our feet by any new possibility

revealed in life: every circle drawn round our own astonishes, though it

be drawn from our centre. The poet in his certainty appears a child of

the heavens, and we strike another foolish line through the crowd, as

though every man were not his own poet as truly as he is his own priest

and governor, as though each were not entitled to see whatever is to be

seen. The masters of thought may teach us better. They address their

loftiest power in us, and never sing to oxen or dogs. The painting,

poem, statue, oratorio, calls to me by name; the morning is an eye that

solicits mine. Shall I take only the husks, and leave to another,

contented, always, the life of life?

He is supreme poet who can make me a poet, able to reach the same

supplies after he is gone. We are bits of iron charged by this magnet,

and lose our quality when it is removed; we are not quite made magnets

as we should be by this magnetic planet and the revolutions of the sun;

yet the great polarity of our globe is a sum of little polarities, and

every scrap of metal has its own. We are made musical by the passing

band; we go on humming and marching to the air; but he who wrote it was

made musical by silence and sunshine. Soon our own vibrations will be

more easily induced, as old instruments sound with a touch or breath. We

shall throb with inarticulate rhythms, and understand the bard who

sings,--

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."

The poet is one who has detected this latency of power in every breast.

His delight is a feeling that all doors are open to all, that he is no

favorite, but the rest are late sleepers, and he only earlier awake.

Depth of genius is measured by depth of this conviction. Egotism is

incurable greenness. An artist is one who has more, not less, respect

for the common eye. The seer points always from his own to a public

privilege,--says never, "I, Jesus, have so received," but, "The Son of

Man must so receive"; and Shakspeare cuts himself into fragments till

there is no Shakspeare left behind, as if expressly to testify that this

wonderful wisdom is not his, but ours, is not that of the thinker and

penman in his study, but of priests and kings, ladies and courtiers,

lovers and warriors, knaves and fools. Paul sees that Moses read his law

from tables of the heart. Every wise word is an echo of the wisdom

inarticulate in our neighbors which sends them confident about their

work and play. The faith of healthy men and women is amazing when we

learn how incapable they are of showing grounds for it. In speculation

they hold horrible theories, blackening the day; yet they trust the good

which their lips unwittingly deny.

In discourse we are moved, not by what a man says, but by what he takes

for granted. The undertow of power is something unstated to which all

his facts and laws refer. But our resource seems to be rather a

reversion, is not quite available; we have blood and a beat at the

heart, yet it does not circulate freely, and Nature to every man is a

double of himself, so that the universe seems also cold in extremities,

as though there were too little original life to fill her veins. The

poet is not fire on the hearth to thaw this numbness by foreign heat. He

rubs and rouses us to activity, drags us to the open air, puts us on a

glowing chase, provokes us to race and climb with him till we also are

thoroughly alive. No other gift of his is worth much beside this hope of

reaching his side. The great know well that all men are approaching

their view even in departing from it, as travellers going from one port

turn their backs on each other here and their faces together toward the

antipodal point: they can leave their discoveries and fame to the race.

There is one object of sight. Every piece of wisdom is no less my

thought because another has found it in my mind. It is more mine than

any perception I called my own, for really with that I have

unconsciously been living in deeps below thought. The rest I have known,

that in all these years I am.

No man seriously doubts that he is born to entertain the meaning of the

world. Already we are inclined to reckon genius a mere faculty of

saying, not of knowing, since it opens a common experience in every

example. Minority and obligation to other eyes will cease. We have

outgrown many a Magnus Apollo of childhood; his beauty is no longer

beautiful, his gold is tinsel, we can dig better for ourselves.

Therefore we can draw no line that will stand between poets and

pretenders. That is fire which fires me to-day; to-morrow the same

influence is frost. The standard is my temperature, a sliding scale. My

neighbors are raised to ecstasy by what seems a rattle of pots and pans;

but I remember when heaven opened to me also in Scheffer, Byron,

Bellini. The judge places himself in his judgment,--declares only what

is now above him, what below. If I find Milton prosaic beside

Swedenborg, perhaps I do Milton no wrong; perhaps no man in the company

so admires his impetuous grandeur; but now the impersonality of the

Swede may meet my need more nearly, with his mysteries of

correspondence, spiritual law, enduring Nature, and supremacy of Love.

Discrimination is worth so much, because there are no great gaps between

man and man, between mind and mind: there is no virtuous, no vicious, no

poet, no unpoet, and only dulness lumps one with angels, another with

dogs. There are infinite kinds and infinite degrees of intelligence;

there is genius in every sort and every stage of adulteration, overlaid

by this, by that, by the other grave mistake; and we cannot afford to be

inhospitable to the feeblest protest against our condition and

ourselves.

We pass all but the few great masters, and they are only before us on

the road. Culture is the opening of spontaneous or liberal activity, and

hangs all on the pivotal perception that everything, experience, effort,

element, history, tradition, art, science, is another opening to the

same centre, and that our life. When the pupil is roused, enchanted,

fired, his redemption from sense is begun; he is delivered to the great

God, if it were only in a crystal or a caterpillar; he will never again

be the clod he was. The years are cruel and cold, want and appetite

devour many a day, but the man can never forget what was promised to the

boy. He believes in thought; believes against thought in the mad world,

in foolish man; believes in himself, and wonders what he could do, if he

had yet only half a chance. All that is streams toward the mind, will

stream through it and be known.

God would not be God, if He could fill less than the universe, could

leave cold and empty corners, could remain beyond thought, could be

order around and not also within the brain. Deity is Revelation. Deity

means for each the germ of knowledge and the sum of knowledge. Man is

the guest of wisdom; he will drop for shame his arrogance, and seek

never again to entertain or patronize this architect and master of the

house. The triumph of inspiration is an unsealing of my own and of every

mind, a delivery of the pupil to private inspiration. When the work of a

master is masterly done, he abdicates therein, retires, and becomes

unregarded as a flight of stairs behind. The statue is a failure, unless

it makes me forget the statue,--the book, unless it makes me forget the

book. All the rhyming, painting, singing of sentimental boys and girls

springs from an intuition hardly yet more than instinct: that Nature has

special scripts for each, to be by him, by her, alone, divined and

published. They reach nothing sincere or unique, yet they feel the

individuality and remoteness of experience. They cannot put forth their

conscious power; but who among the gods of fame can put forth his power?

Emerson says Jove cannot get his own thunder; much less can any mortal

get his own thunder, however he may apply to Minerva for the key.

By the cheer of awakening intuition, a dawn which stirs before daylight,

all men are secretly sustained. The common life is a borrowing, not a

creation and giving: imitation is going on all-fours, and man is uneasy

in that animal attitude. The horse comes only as horse: I am here not

merely as man, but as John; I blush and ache till John is something

pronounced and maintained against the mob of centuries, till men must

feel his singularity and solidity, as the ocean is displaced and

readjusted by every drop of rain. More or less, I must at least purely

avail. Erectness is delivery to the private law, and something in each

remains erect, and lifts him above the brute and the crowd. He is, and

feels himself to be: he will advance and give the law of his life.

The brain is itself a nut from the tree Ygdrasil; it carries the world,

and in the first glances we anticipate all knowledge. The joy of life

does not wait for any theory of life, for we have only slept since the

thought in us was embodied in this system; we took part in the making;

we are drowsily at home with ourselves therein; we forget, yet do not

forget, the roundness of design. As in a common experience we are often

close upon some name which we seek to recall,--we feel, but cannot touch

it,--so the secret of Nature lies close to the mind, and sustains us as

if by magnetic communication, while we have yet no faculty to explore

our own being or this apparition of it, the whirl of worlds.

We have rightly held genius to be miracle; but our great hope is

postponed for lack of perception that all life is miracle, that man in

every endowment is a form of the same plastic, incalculable power. Yet

as we are brought to seek goodness, being sinners, so we shall be

brought to seek the last perception, being dolts. The masters have not

been quite masters, and their theory has never respected the natural as

opening to a supernatural mind. We eat and drink and wait to be

arrested, not by sunshine, but lightning. It comes at last, revealing

from heaven the height and depth of our human prospect. The vision is

appalling; the seer is stricken to the ground; he has no organ able to

bear this light; he is blinded; he runs trembling for counsel to Paul,

who was beaten from his horse, to Samuel, who was called in sleep, to

Jesus, who taught the new birth, to John, who saw the white throne. But

after a little we learn that the new experience is native to us as

breath. No degeneracy of any period, no immersion in war, trade,

production, tradition, can quite hide the cardinal fact that this

strength of antiquity, of eternity, waits to descend, and does from time

to time descend, into the private breast. He who prays has made the

discovery, and is put by his own act in lonely communication with all

heavens.

We find the sacred history legible only in the same light by which it

was written: we are referred by it, therefore, to sources of

interpretation above itself. God was hidden in the sky; the book in

another sky; who shall reveal God hidden in the book? After so many

ages, it has become a riddle as difficult of solution as any for which

it offers solution: the last and best puzzle of the exulting old Sphinx,

who will never be cheated of her jest. Our Christianity misses the

highest value of the book, as it indicates the resource of universal

man. We use the cover as some charm against danger, but the secret of

devotion is not reached. At last it is plain that secular, nigh

impenetrable Nature is a door as easily opened as this of the book. We

must read upon our knees, we wait for grace to open the text, God must

descend to light the page. The Quaker names our interpreter an inner

light, the Church a Holy Ghost to purge the heart and eye. A deity who

comes directly, and is no longer to seek when we are ready to read, must

abolish the book. Of all gods offered in our Pantheon, of all persons in

our Trinity, this must be the first.

I cannot fasten on the revelation which needs another to make it

revelation to me; but when the divine aid is given, we seek no farther,

for in this communion we have already all that was sought. The private

illumination converts to gospel every creature on which its ray may

fall; it makes a Bible of the world, a Bible of the heart. The doctors

with dandling have now kept the child from his feet till there is doubt

whether he have any feet. In this cradle of the record he shall spend

his snug and comfortable life. "Here is safety!" Of course, he is

bed-ridden.

But the weakness of man is no impediment to God. Remember who creates,

who renews, who goes abroad in perpetual miracle of building,

inhabiting, becoming. It is not a question of human power, but of

divine.

Spiritual presence, apocalypse of every apocalypse, becomes our primal

fact. It is the root of Protestantism, Democracy, Individualism. The

sanctity of conscience is a rest of man upon undeniable Deity. There is

no room for intervention of Peter or Paul.

The mind is immanence of Being, an original relation to all we have

named reality and worshipped as divine. There are truths which we must

reckon with Swedenborg among the Fundamentals of Humanity. To hold them

is to be Man,--to be admitted to the hopeful council of our kind.

Freedom is such a fundamental of the moral sense. From the thought of

property in man we erect ourselves in God's name with indignant

protestation, wiping it and its apologists together as dirt from our

feet. By an equal necessity we count out from every discourse of reason

those who find in them no organ of ultimate communication, who refer

from common consciousness to saint and sage, as though God could be shut

from presence and supremacy in thought. They are intellectual

non-combatants who so refer. We take them at their own valuation; their

certainty of uncertainty, their confession of remoteness from the centre

we accept; but we must turn from the very angels, if they be not

permitted for themselves to know. There is no outside to the universe

except this embryotic condition, wherein a man may think that there is

no result of thought.

I suppose no individual thinker will ever again have the importance

which attaches to a few names in history. No man will found a religion

with Mahomet, or overlie philosophers like Calvin, or shoulder out the

poets like Shakspeare; still less will any man again be worshipped as a

personal god. Let the newcomer be never so great, there is now a

greatness in public thought to dwarf his proportions. He antedated all

discoveries who first uttered the sacred name. That ray on darkness

tells. Now we have nations of philosophers, thought flies like

thistle-down, and the sublime speculations of the fore-world are

cradle-songs and first spelling-lessons to excite the guesses of every

barefooted boy. In early ages men met face to face with Nature, and

spent their strength directly in questioning her. Now the work of God is

overlaid. Every blunder is a rock in our field, and at last the field is

a stone-heap of blunders, and our giants have work enough to reach any

ground in the unsophisticated facts of life. We set no limit to the

revolutionary power of truth; in happy hour it may sweep away doctrine

and usage, supplant systems by songs, and governments by Love. Yet the

first men were able to cleave the world to its centre, and predict the

last results. We only enlarge their openings. Schools follow schools,

Eclecticism comes with its band into the field to gather every ear; but

Plato stands smiling behind, and holds in his hands that simple divided

line, the image of all we know.

Who can wonder at the authority of the ancients, unbowed by an antiquity

behind? Freedom from authority gave their directness, their simplicity,

their superiority to misgiving and second thought, their confident "Thus

saith the Lord."

We boast our enlightenment, but now the best minds are in question

whether we have not lost as much by the ancients as we have gained.

Plainly, they have not yet done their own work, have not given us to

ourselves and to God. They should have been less or greater; they did

not quite liberate, but became oppressors of the mind. To this

misfortune we begin to find a single exception. Jesus, with his primal

doctrine of a divine humanity, will now at last avail to be understood,

will deliver us from every teacher to a Father in the heavens, and put

us in direct communication with Him through the moral sense. After so

many blind centuries, his truth breaks out, draws us to him from the

misunderstanding of his followers, and refers from himself to the

sources of his incomparable life.

Two men of our time are the primitive Christians,--not known for such,

because their springs open, with those of the Master, not in any

character, but in the Cause. They share his reliance, and accept in

simplicity those brotherly words in which he extends his privilege to

every child.

He will open to us Nature, for his habit is the only natural. He has no

anxiety for immediate results, is never guarded in expression, does

never explain; he makes no record of thought, calls no scholar to be

scribe; he knows no labors, no studies; he walks on the hills, and

frankly interprets the waving grain, the seed in the furrow, the lily,

and the weed. Here is power which takes no thought for the morrow, an

attitude which works endless revolutions without means or care or cost.

We must not dwell on this supreme example, lest we leave the hope of

every reader far behind. Let us rather keep the level of common

experience, and disclose the incursions of spirit which light a humble

life. Love and Providence will appear in every breast; nothing more than

Love and Providence appears to us above.

A supreme genius will fail, rather by under- than over-statement, to

balance the popular exaggeration and repetition of fine phrases for

which we have no corresponding fact. Why should any man be zealous or

impatient? Why press a moral, dissecting it skeleton-like from throbbing

textures of Freedom and Beauty? Why preach, threaten, and drive us with

these bones, when a lover may draw us with kisses on living lips? Nature

offers Duty as a manlier pleasure, leads the will so softly as to set us

free in following, and her last thrill of delight is the steady

heart-beat of heroism, facing danger with level eyes and fatal

determination. Fear may arrest, but never restore. It is an arrest of

fever by freezing, of disease by disease. Let it be understood, once for

all, that this universe is moral, and say no more about that. Every man

loves goodness, and the saint never exhorts to this love, but reinforces

by addressing himself to it as matter of course. All power is a like

repose on the basis of common desires and perceptions in the race. The

didactic method is an insult alike to the pupil and the universe.

Socrates is master and gentleman with his questions, suggestions,

seeking in me and acting as midwife to my thought; but all _illuminati_

and professors, all who talk down or cut our meat into morsels, will

quickly be counted aunties by the vigorous boys at school. Chairs and

pulpits totter to-day with a scholastic dry rot, which is inability to

recognize the equality of unsophisticated man to man. There will soon be

no more chair or desk; the only eminence will be that of one who can

stand with feet on the common level, and still utter over our heads a

regenerating word. We shall learn to address ourselves in an audience,

to utter before millions, as if in joyful soliloquy, the sincerest,

tenderest thought. Speak as if to angels, and you shall speak to angels;

take unhesitating inmost counsel with mankind. The response to every

pure desire is instant and wonderful. Thousands listen to-day for a word

which waits in the air and has never been spoken, a word of courage to

carry forward the purpose of their lives.

Thought points to unity, and the thinker is impatient of squinting and

side-glances while all eyes should be turned together to the same.

Thought is growing agreement, and that in which the race cannot meet me

is some whim or notion, a personal crotchet, not a cosmic and eternal

truth. Genius is freedom from all oddity, is Catholicity,--and departure

from it so much departure in me from Nature and myself. We say a man is

original, if he lives at first, and not at second hand,--if he requires

a new tombstone,--if he takes law, not from the many or the few, but

from the sky,--if he is no subordinate, but an authority,--if he does

not borrow judgment, but is judgment. Such a man is singular in his

attitude only because we have so fallen from purity. He, not the

fashion, is _comme il faut_. By every word and act he declares that as

he is so all men must shortly be.

Plato and Swedenborg are trying to speak the same word, but each can

avail only to turn some syllable. They regret this partiality as a

provincial burr, as greenness and narrowness. Genius sees the white

light and regrets its own impurity, though that be piquancy to the

multitude, and marketable as a splendid blue or gold. Manner, in

thought, speech, behavior, is popularity and falsehood; is the limping

of a king deformity, though it set the fashion of limping. The grandest

thoughts are colorless as water; they savor not of Milton, Socrates, or

Menu; seem not drawn from any private cistern, but rain-drops out of the

pure sky. Whim and conceit are tare and tret. It matters little whether

a man whine with Coleridge, or boast with Ben Jonson, or sneer with

Byron, or grumble with Carlyle, if every thought is one-sided and

warped. The oddity relieves our commonplace, and pricks the dull palate;

but we soon tire of exaggeration, and detest the trick. It is egotism,

self-sickness, jaundice, adulteration of the light. We name it the

subjective habit, personality; while the right illumination is a

transparency, a putting-off of shoes, garments, body, and constitution,

lest these should intercept or stain the ray. Genius is an eye single

and serene. Good speech carries the sound of no man's, of no angel's

voice. Good writing betrays no man's hand, but is as if traced by the

finger of God.

Original will signify, therefore, not peculiar, but universal. The

original is one who lives from the Maker, not from man. He has found and

asserts himself as a piece of primal design: he is somewhat, and his

life therefore significant. He first represents man in purity, man in

God, and is a revelation. No matter what he repeats as approved, he will

not be a repetition, but will give new value to each thing by his

approval. The wisest man in separate propositions repeats only what has

many times been spoken. In my reading of this past week I find

anticipated every item of modern thought. Hooker says of the Bible,--"By

looking in it for that which it is impossible that any book can have, we

lose the benefits which we might reap from its being the best of books."

Milton says,--

"He who reads and to his reading brings not

A spirit and judgment equal or superior,

(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)

Uncertain and unsettled still remains."

Coleridge gives perfect confidence to paradox as sure of solution above

the term of it; in his "Table-Talk" he antedates Carlyle's doctrine of

dynamics,--puts Faith above belief, as in another region of the

mind,--declares that the conceivable is not to be revered, and says,

before Emerson, that existence is the Fall of Man. But the failure of

Coleridge teaches that no single perceptions, however subtile or deep,

will solve the broad problem of Nature. These separate thoughts the

great hold in new emphasis and relation. Of such sparks they make a

flame, of such timbers a house or ship. The parts may be old, the whole

is not; and Goethe falls into a modest fallacy, when, in acknowledging

his obligation to others, he disclaims originality for himself. All is

new in his use of it: you may say he has taken nothing, for what was

iron or silver where he found it is gold in his transmuting grasp.

When a man authentic speaks, our interest goes through every statement

to himself. The root of that word is not in the market or the street,

but in humanity, and through that in the deep. We study Goethe, not any

opinion of Goethe: he represents for us in his measure the nature, need,

and resource of the race, because what he publishes he knows, lives, and

is. We open the mind largely to take the sense of such a gospel: it will

not appear in details of perception. Plato and Goethe see the same sun,

and seem to the vulgar to follow each other; they have more in common

than any man can have in privacy; yet if you enter to the entire habit

of each, you will justify the making of these two. They are like and

unlike, as apples on one and another tree. The great in any time hold in

common the growing truth of their time, and refer to it in intercourse

as understood, an atmosphere which he must breathe who now lives and

thinks; yet no two will be identically related to the same. We are

radiated as spokes from a centre; we enter to it and work for it from

every side.

There is no danger of repetition, if the thought be deep. Superior

insight will always sufficiently astonish, will always be novel in its

place. The more simple the method, the more wonderful every result. Men

are shut, as if by a wall of adamant, from all that is yet beyond their

sympathy. My neighbor is immersed in planting, building, and the new

road. Beside him, companion only in air and sunshine, walks one who has

no ocular adjustment for these atoms; his thought overleaps them in

starting, and is wholly beyond. The end of vision for a practical eye is

beginning of clairvoyance. To the road-maker, man is a maker of roads;

he cracks his nuts and his jokes unconscious, while the ground opens and

the world heaves with revolutions of thought. Ask him in vain what

Webster means by "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill"; what Channing

sees in the Dignity of Man, or Edwards in the Sweetness of Divine Love;

ask him in vain what is the "Fate" of Aeschylus, the "Compensation" of

Emerson, Carlyle's "Conflux of Eternities," the "Conjunction" of

Swedenborg, the "Newness" of Fox, the "Morning Red" of Behmen, the

"Renunciation" of Goethe, the "Comforter" of Jesus, the "Justification"

of Paul.

For the dull, this mystery of existence is not even a mystery; they are

shut below the firmament of wonder. When the vulgar come with their

definite gain and good, their circle of immediate ends, we feel the

house contract, the sky descend,--we shrivel, our pores close, the skull

hardens on the brain. The positive, who exactly knows, is a skeleton at

the feast; that exactness is numbness, and chills every expansive guest.

Dogma is a stoppage quite short of the nearest beginning; the liberal

habit a beginning of all that has no end. Sense is a wall very near the

eye, and when that is penetrated all lies open beyond; we see only

paths, seas, and vistas. Wisdom explores and never concludes. The

explanations of centuries are idle tales: my explanations are not so to

be forestalled. We forget the shallow answers to shallow questions, when

now we have deeper genuine questions to ask. The great are happy babes

of Beauty and Good. Truth returns in a fresh suspicion, and all are

welcome who wear on the brows that soft commingled light and shadow of

an advancing, sweet, inexplicable Fate. Our hope is no house, but a

wing; no roof can be endured but the blue one. What method have we yet

to serve the spontaneous or spiritual being? what culture, art, society,

worship, in which his need and power are so much as recognized? There is

indefinable certainty of Nature beyond Nature, man beyond man. Genius

opens all doors, the earth-doors, the sky-doors,--throws down the

horizon and the heaven, to come into open air. All paths lead out to the

sea, where a day's voyage may teach that the receding circle bounds our

sight alone, and not the deep. We look out not on chaos and darkness,

but on order too large for the brain, and light, for which as owls we

have yet no capacious eye. We leave every perception neglected to wait

on the future; but every future has its future devouring the past. What

is left but bending of the knee and boundless confidence?

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