. There will soon be
no more chair or desk; the only eminence will be that of one who can
stand with feet on the common level, and still utter over our heads a
regenerating word. We shall learn to address ourselves in an audience,
to utter before millions, as if in joyful soliloquy, the sincerest,
tenderest thought. Speak as if to angels, and you shall speak to angels;
take unhesitating inmost counsel with mankind. The response to every
pure desire is instant and wonderful. Thousands listen to-day for a word
which waits in the air and has never been spoken, a word of courage to
carry forward the purpose of their lives.

Thought points to unity, and the thinker is impatient of squinting and
side-glances while all eyes should be turned together to the same.
Thought is growing agreement, and that in which the race cannot meet me
is some whim or notion, a personal crotchet, not a cosmic and eternal
truth. Genius is freedom from all oddity, is Catholicity,--and departure
from it so much departure in me from Nature and myself. We say a man is
original, if he lives at first, and not at second hand,--if he requires
a new tombstone,--if he takes law, not from the many or the few, but
from the sky,--if he is no subordinate, but an authority,--if he does
not borrow judgment, but is judgment. Such a man is singular in his
attitude only because we have so fallen from purity. He, not the
fashion, is _comme il faut_. By every word and act he declares that as
he is so all men must shortly be.

Plato and Swedenborg are trying to speak the same word, but each can
avail only to turn some syllable. They regret this partiality as a
provincial burr, as greenness and narrowness. Genius sees the white
light and regrets its own impurity, though that be piquancy to the
multitude, and marketable as a splendid blue or gold. Manner, in
thought, speech, behavior, is popularity and falsehood; is the limping
of a king deformity, though it set the fashion of limping. The grandest
thoughts are colorless as water; they savor not of Milton, Socrates, or
Menu; seem not drawn from any private cistern, but rain-drops out of the
pure sky. Whim and conceit are tare and tret. It matters little whether
a man whine with Coleridge, or boast with Ben Jonson, or sneer with
Byron, or grumble with Carlyle, if every thought is one-sided and
warped. The oddity relieves our commonplace, and pricks the dull palate;
but we soon tire of exaggeration, and detest the trick.