on 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 gol