a cock on top of the barn, puts an eye and a nose to every triangle of the geometer, and paints faces on the wheels of his mechanical brother.  In all these boys there is something more than ability; there is propensity, an attraction irresistible.  Their minds run, we say, in that direction, and they creep or lie still, if turned in another.  The young shepherd will toss eggs, spin platters, and balance knives, year after year, in solitude, with a patient energy and endurance able to command any fortune.

What philter is in these faculties?  The boy who will be great is always discontented with his work, ready to rub out and begin again.  He follows a bee, and never quite touches that which drew him on.  Plainly, the mere ability to do is a dry straw, but through it our seeker tastes an intoxicating, seductive liquor, from which he cannot take away his lips.

It is the liquor of our life.  In measure, or form, or tone, he applies himself to the very breasts of Nature, and draws through these exteriors a motherly milk which was her blood and hastens to be his own.  If the young cub holds fast to the teat, be sure the stream flows and his veins swell.  Matter is the dry rind of this succulent, nutritious universe:  prick it on any side, and you draw the same juice.  Varieties of endowment are only so many pitchers dipped in one stream.  Poet, painter, musician, mathematician, the gift is an accident of organization, the result is admission to that by which all things are, and by partaking which we become what we must be.

Of this experience there can be no adequate report.  It is as though one should attempt to go up in a balloon above the atmosphere and bring down the ether in his hands.  There is a spring on every door in Nature to close it behind the returning footsteps of her lover, so that he can lead no man freely into the chamber where she gave him love; it is only by the confidence, fervency, and reverence of the initiate that we learn in what presence he has been.  Genius is great, but no product of genius is more than a shadow which points to this sun behind the sun as its substance, and the power of our inspired men has been merely manifested, not rightly employed.  Genius has availed only to authenticate itself as the normal activity of man, not yet to do the work of the world.

Sense is a tangle of contradiction.  The boy throws wood on water and it floats; then he throws in his new knife and it sinks.  How was he to know that the same force will lift a stick and swallow a knife?  He throws a feather after his knife, and away it swims on the wind.  That is another brook, then, in which the feather is a stick and the stick a stone.  Not only are results of a single law opposed, but the laws pull one this way, one that, as gravitation contends with currents of water and air.  If we could be shut in sense and surface, Nature would seem a game of cross-purposes, every creature devouring another.  The beast eats plant and beast; he dies,