y become our own.

Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The
learned member of the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington,
speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now
invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes;
the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates,
and it will bereave his fine attitudes and resistance of something of
their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke
and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so there were fountains all
around Homer, Manu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends,
lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished--which, if seen,
would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did he
feel himself overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the
consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delphi
whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so,
yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debts which
such a man could contract to other wit would never disturb his
consciousness of originality; for the ministrations of books and of
other minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which
he has conversed.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the
world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand
wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a
wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language.
But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and
churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was
not some translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy and
pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a translation
of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church,--these collected, too,
in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every saint and
sacred writer all over the world. Grotius makes the like remark in
respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is
composed were already in use in the time of Christ, in the Rabbinical
forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the
Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts and the precision and
substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contrib