he intellect is vagabond, and
our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our
bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but
the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our
shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes,
our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul
created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind
that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own
thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And
why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience,
grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to us as to any,
and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise
thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the
length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of
the government, he will create a house in which all these will find
themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every
moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but
of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half
possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can
teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has
exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare?
Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington,
or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of
Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never
be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and
you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment
for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of
Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but
different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all
eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if
you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in
the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of
one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy
heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our
spirit of socie