We pass all but the few great masters, and they are only before us on the road.  Culture is the opening of spontaneous or liberal activity, and hangs all on the pivotal perception that everything, experience, effort, element, history, tradition, art, science, is another opening to the same centre, and that our life.  When the pupil is roused, enchanted, fired, his redemption from sense is begun; he is delivered to the great God, if it were only in a crystal or a caterpillar; he will never again be the clod he was.  The years are cruel and cold, want and appetite devour many a day, but the man can never forget what was promised to the boy.  He believes in thought; believes against thought in the mad world, in foolish man; believes in himself, and wonders what he could do, if he had yet only half a chance.  All that is streams toward the mind, will stream through it and be known.

God would not be God, if He could fill less than the universe, could leave cold and empty corners, could remain beyond thought, could be order around and not also within the brain.  Deity is Revelation.  Deity means for each the germ of knowledge and the sum of knowledge.  Man is the guest of wisdom; he will drop for shame his arrogance, and seek never again to entertain or patronize this architect and master of the house.  The triumph of inspiration is an unsealing of my own and of every mind, a delivery of the pupil to private inspiration.  When the work of a master is masterly done, he abdicates therein, retires, and becomes unregarded as a flight of stairs behind.  The statue is a failure, unless it makes me forget the statue,—­the book, unless it makes me forget the book.  All the rhyming, painting, singing of sentimental boys and girls springs from an intuition hardly yet more than instinct:  that Nature has special scripts for each, to be by him, by her, alone, divined and published.  They reach nothing sincere or unique, yet they feel the individuality and remoteness of experience.  They cannot put forth their conscious power; but who among the gods of fame can put forth his power?  Emerson says Jove cannot get his own thunder; much less can any mortal get his own thunder, however he may apply to Minerva for the key.

By the cheer of awakening intuition, a dawn which stirs before daylight, all men are secretly sustained.  The common life is a borrowing, not a creation and giving:  imitation is going on all-fours, and man is uneasy in that animal attitude.  The horse comes only as horse:  I am here not merely as man, but as John; I blush and ache till John is something pronounced and maintained against the mob of centuries, till men must feel his singularity and solidity, as the ocean is displaced and readjusted by every drop of rain.  More or less, I must at least purely avail.  Erectness is delivery to the private law, and something in each remains erect, and lifts him above the brute and the crowd.  He is, and feels himself to be:  he will advance and give the law of his life.