law breaking out
in a thousand different forms,--the completing of the circle when only
a segment is given. The visible and the invisible make up one sphere of
which each is a part. We are related to both; our root is in one, our
top in the other. Our ideas date from spirit and appear in fact. The
ideal informs the actual. This is the way the intellect detaches and
gets expressed. It is not its own interpreter, and, like everything
else, is only one side of a law which is explained by the other side.
The mind is the cope and the world the draw, to use the language of the
moulder. The intellect uses the outward, as the sculptor uses marble, to
embody and speak its thought. It seizes upon a fact as upon a lever, to
separate and lift up some fraction of its meaning. From Nature, from
science, from experience, it traces laws, till they appear in itself,
and thus finds a thread to string its thought on.

Without Analogy, without this marrying of the inward and the outward,
there can be no speech, no expression. It is a necessity of our
condition. Spirit is cognizable by us only when endowed with a material
body; so an idea or a feeling can be stated only when it puts on the
form and definiteness of the sensuous, the empirical. Hence the highest
utterance is a perpetual marrying of thought with things, as in
poetry,--a lifting up of the actual and a bringing down of the
ideal,--giving a soul to the one and a body to the other. This takes
place more or less in all speech, but only with genius is it natural and
complete. Ordinary minds inherit their language and form of expression;
but with the poet, or natural sayer, a new step is taken, and new
analogies, new likenesses must be disclosed. He is distinguished from
the second-hand man by the fulness and completeness of his expression;
his words are round and embrace the two hemispheres, the actual and the
ideal. He points out analogies under our feet, and presents the near and
the remote wedded in every act of his mind. Nothing is old with him,
but Nature is forever new like the day, and gives him pure and fresh
thoughts as she gives him pure and fresh water. Hence the expressiveness
of poetry and its power over the human heart. It differs from prose only
in degree, not in essence. It goes farther and accomplishes more. It
is the blossom of which prose is the bud, and comes with sincerity,
simplicity, purity of motive, and a vital relation to Nature.

As men grow earnest and