e 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 explo