. 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. Caesar 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. T