normal powers; and to
this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing,
theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or
science, or animal intoxication,--which are several coarser or
finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the
ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. These are
auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out
into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body
in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations
in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were
professionally expressers of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and
actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and
indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was
a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into
the heavens but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for
that advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never
can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the
world, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the
sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure
and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not an inspiration,
which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury.
Milton says that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but
the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods and their descent unto men,
must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not 'Devil's wine,'
but God's wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands
and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and
horses; withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects
of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which
should be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be set on
a key so low that the common influences should delight him. His
cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice
for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit
which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from
every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump and half-imbedded
stone on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and
hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with