r the poet to put himself in another's place. And so, while
his pen wrote, his heart felt itself to be the king and also his
servant, to be the merchant and also his clerk, to be the general and
also his soldier. He saw the assassin drawing near the throne with a
dagger beneath his cloak; he went forth with King Lear to shiver
beneath the wintry blasts; he rejoiced with Rosalind and wept with
Hamlet, and there was no joy or grief or woe or wrong that ever touched
a human heart that he did not perfectly feel and, therefore, perfectly
describe. For depth of mind begins with depth of heart. The greatest
writers are primarily seers and only incidentally thinkers. As of old,
so now, for a thousand thinkers there is only one great seer.

Having affirmed the influence of the heart upon the intellect and
scholarship, let us hasten to confess that the heart determines the
religious belief and creed. It is often said that belief is a matter
of pure reason determined wholly by evidence. And doubtless it is true
that in approaching mathematical proofs man is to discharge his mind of
all color. That two and two are four is true for the poet and the
miser, for the peaceable man not less than the litigious. But of the
other truths of life it is a fact that with the heart man believes. We
approach wheat with scales, we measure silk with a yardstick; we test
the painting with taste and imagination, and the symphony with the
sense of melody; motives and actions are tested by conscience; we
approach the stars with a telescope, while purity of heart is the glass
by which we see God. The scales that are useful in the laboratory are
utterly valueless in the art gallery. The scientific faculty that fits
Spencer for studying nature unfits him for studying art. In his old
age Huxley, the scientist, wrote an essay forty pages long to prove
that man was more beautiful than woman. Imagine some Tyndall
approaching the transfiguration of Raphael to scrape off the colors and
test them with acid and alkali for finding out the proportion of blue
and crimson and gold. These are the methods that would give the
village paint-grinder precedency above genius itself.

In 1837 two boys entered Faneuil hall and heard Wendell Phillips'
defense of Lovejoy. One youth was an English visitor who saw the
portraits of Otis and Hancock, yet saw them not; heard the words of
Phillips, yet heard them not, and because his heart was in London
believed not