and artery, eye and ear, and all the admirable servitors of the soul, steadily bringing to that invisible matrix where it houses their costly nutriments, their sacred offices; while every part and act of experience, every gush of jubilance, every stifle of woe, all sweet pangs of love and pity, all high breathings of faith and resolve, contribute to the form and bloom it finally wears.  Yet the more profound and necessary product of one’s spirit it is, the more likely at last to fall softly from him,—­so softly, perhaps, that he himself shall be half-unaware when the separation occurs.

And such only are men of genius as accomplish this divine utterance.  The voice itself may be strong or tiny,—­that of a seraph, or that of a song-sparrow; the range and power of combination may be Beethoven’s, or only such as are found in the hum of bees; but in this genuineness, this depth of ancestry and purity of growth, this unmistakable issue under the patronage of Nature, there is a test of genius that cannot vary.  He is not inimitable who imitates.  He that speaks only what he has learned speaks what the world will not long or greatly desire to learn from him.  “Shakspeare,” said Dryden, not having the fear of Locke before his eyes, “was naturally learned”; but whoever is quite destitute of natural learning will never achieve winged words by dint and travail of other erudition.  If his soul have not been to school before coming to his body, it is late in life for him to qualify himself for a teacher of mankind.  Words that are cups to contain the last essences of a sincere life bear elixirs of life for as many lips as shall touch their brim; they refresh all generations, nor by any quaffing of generations are they to be drained.

To this ease it may be owing that poets and artists are often so ill judges of their own success.  Their happiest performance is too nearly of the same color with their permanent consciousness to be seen in relief:  work less sincere—­that is, more related and bound to some partial state or particular mood—­would stand out more to the eye of the doer.  To this error he will be less exposed who learns—­as most assuredly every artist should—­to estimate his work, not as it seems to him striking, but as it echoes to his ear the earliest murmurs of his childhood, and reclaims for the heart its wandered memories.  Perhaps it is common for one’s happiest thoughts, in the moment of their apparition in words, to affect him with a gentle surprise and sense of newness; but soon afterwards they may probably come to touch him, on the contrary, with a vague sense of reminiscence, as if his mother had sung them by his cradle, or somewhere under the rosy east of life he had heard them from others.  A statement of our own which seems to us very new and striking is probably partial, is in some degree foreign to our hearts; that which one, being the soul he is, could not do otherwise than say is probably what he was created for the purpose