Presenting truth, I declare it as freely yours as mine.  Every act of genius proclaims that the highest gift is no monopoly or singularity, no privilege of one, but the birthright of the race.  Shakspeare knows well that we shall easily see what he sees; he considers it no secret.  We are always feeling beforehand for every right word now about to be spoken in the world; many men give tokens of the general habit of thought before he is born who clearly knows what all were dreaming.  Wisdom has only gone before us on our own path, and we overtake our guide in every perception.  Yet we are lifted quite off our feet by any new possibility revealed in life:  every circle drawn round our own astonishes, though it be drawn from our centre.  The poet in his certainty appears a child of the heavens, and we strike another foolish line through the crowd, as though every man were not his own poet as truly as he is his own priest and governor, as though each were not entitled to see whatever is to be seen.  The masters of thought may teach us better.  They address their loftiest power in us, and never sing to oxen or dogs.  The painting, poem, statue, oratorio, calls to me by name; the morning is an eye that solicits mine.  Shall I take only the husks, and leave to another, contented, always, the life of life?

He is supreme poet who can make me a poet, able to reach the same supplies after he is gone.  We are bits of iron charged by this magnet, and lose our quality when it is removed; we are not quite made magnets as we should be by this magnetic planet and the revolutions of the sun; yet the great polarity of our globe is a sum of little polarities, and every scrap of metal has its own.  We are made musical by the passing band; we go on humming and marching to the air; but he who wrote it was made musical by silence and sunshine.  Soon our own vibrations will be more easily induced, as old instruments sound with a touch or breath.  We shall throb with inarticulate rhythms, and understand the bard who sings,—­

  “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”

The poet is one who has detected this latency of power in every breast.  His delight is a feeling that all doors are open to all, that he is no favorite, but the rest are late sleepers, and he only earlier awake.  Depth of genius is measured by depth of this conviction.  Egotism is incurable greenness.  An artist is one who has more, not less, respect for the common eye.  The seer points always from his own to a public privilege,—­says never, “I, Jesus, have so received,” but, “The Son of Man must so receive”; and Shakspeare cuts himself into fragments till there is no Shakspeare left behind, as if expressly to testify that this wonderful wisdom is not his, but ours, is not that of the thinker and penman in his study, but of priests and kings, ladies and courtiers, lovers and warriors, knaves and fools.  Paul sees that Moses read his law from tables of the heart.  Every wise word is an echo of the wisdom inarticulate in our neighbors which sends them confident about their work and play.  The faith of healthy men and women is amazing when we learn how incapable they are of showing grounds for it.  In speculation they hold horrible theories, blackening the day; yet they trust the good which their lips unwittingly deny.