In discourse we are moved, not by what a man says, but by what he takes for granted.  The undertow of power is something unstated to which all his facts and laws refer.  But our resource seems to be rather a reversion, is not quite available; we have blood and a beat at the heart, yet it does not circulate freely, and Nature to every man is a double of himself, so that the universe seems also cold in extremities, as though there were too little original life to fill her veins.  The poet is not fire on the hearth to thaw this numbness by foreign heat.  He rubs and rouses us to activity, drags us to the open air, puts us on a glowing chase, provokes us to race and climb with him till we also are thoroughly alive.  No other gift of his is worth much beside this hope of reaching his side.  The great know well that all men are approaching their view even in departing from it, as travellers going from one port turn their backs on each other here and their faces together toward the antipodal point:  they can leave their discoveries and fame to the race.  There is one object of sight.  Every piece of wisdom is no less my thought because another has found it in my mind.  It is more mine than any perception I called my own, for really with that I have unconsciously been living in deeps below thought.  The rest I have known, that in all these years I am.

No man seriously doubts that he is born to entertain the meaning of the world.  Already we are inclined to reckon genius a mere faculty of saying, not of knowing, since it opens a common experience in every example.  Minority and obligation to other eyes will cease.  We have outgrown many a Magnus Apollo of childhood; his beauty is no longer beautiful, his gold is tinsel, we can dig better for ourselves.  Therefore we can draw no line that will stand between poets and pretenders.  That is fire which fires me to-day; to-morrow the same influence is frost.  The standard is my temperature, a sliding scale.  My neighbors are raised to ecstasy by what seems a rattle of pots and pans; but I remember when heaven opened to me also in Scheffer, Byron, Bellini.  The judge places himself in his judgment,—­declares only what is now above him, what below.  If I find Milton prosaic beside Swedenborg, perhaps I do Milton no wrong; perhaps no man in the company so admires his impetuous grandeur; but now the impersonality of the Swede may meet my need more nearly, with his mysteries of correspondence, spiritual law, enduring Nature, and supremacy of Love.  Discrimination is worth so much, because there are no great gaps between man and man, between mind and mind:  there is no virtuous, no vicious, no poet, no unpoet, and only dulness lumps one with angels, another with dogs.  There are infinite kinds and infinite degrees of intelligence; there is genius in every sort and every stage of adulteration, overlaid by this, by that, by the other grave mistake; and we cannot afford to be inhospitable to the feeblest protest against our condition and ourselves.