It is egotism,
self-sickness, jaundice, adulteration of the light. We name it the
subjective habit, personality; while the right illumination is a
transparency, a putting-off of shoes, garments, body, and constitution,
lest these should intercept or stain the ray. Genius is an eye single
and serene. Good speech carries the sound of no man's, of no angel's
voice. Good writing betrays no man's hand, but is as if traced by the
finger of God.

Original will signify, therefore, not peculiar, but universal. The
original is one who lives from the Maker, not from man. He has found and
asserts himself as a piece of primal design: he is somewhat, and his
life therefore significant. He first represents man in purity, man in
God, and is a revelation. No matter what he repeats as approved, he will
not be a repetition, but will give new value to each thing by his
approval. The wisest man in separate propositions repeats only what has
many times been spoken. In my reading of this past week I find
anticipated every item of modern thought. Hooker says of the Bible,--"By
looking in it for that which it is impossible that any book can have, we
lose the benefits which we might reap from its being the best of books."
Milton says,--

"He who reads and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains."

Coleridge gives perfect confidence to paradox as sure of solution above
the term of it; in his "Table-Talk" he antedates Carlyle's doctrine of
dynamics,--puts Faith above belief, as in another region of the
mind,--declares that the conceivable is not to be revered, and says,
before Emerson, that existence is the Fall of Man. But the failure of
Coleridge teaches that no single perceptions, however subtile or deep,
will solve the broad problem of Nature. These separate thoughts the
great hold in new emphasis and relation. Of such sparks they make a
flame, of such timbers a house or ship. The parts may be old, the whole
is not; and Goethe falls into a modest fallacy, when, in acknowledging
his obligation to others, he disclaims originality for himself. All is
new in his use of it: you may say he has taken nothing, for what was
iron or silver where he found it is gold in his transmuting grasp.

When a man authentic speaks, our interest goes through every statement
to himself. The root of that word is not in the market or the stre