A supreme genius will fail, rather by under- than over-statement, to balance the popular exaggeration and repetition of fine phrases for which we have no corresponding fact.  Why should any man be zealous or impatient?  Why press a moral, dissecting it skeleton-like from throbbing textures of Freedom and Beauty?  Why preach, threaten, and drive us with these bones, when a lover may draw us with kisses on living lips?  Nature offers Duty as a manlier pleasure, leads the will so softly as to set us free in following, and her last thrill of delight is the steady heart-beat of heroism, facing danger with level eyes and fatal determination.  Fear may arrest, but never restore.  It is an arrest of fever by freezing, of disease by disease.  Let it be understood, once for all, that this universe is moral, and say no more about that.  Every man loves goodness, and the saint never exhorts to this love, but reinforces by addressing himself to it as matter of course.  All power is a like repose on the basis of common desires and perceptions in the race.  The didactic method is an insult alike to the pupil and the universe.  Socrates is master and gentleman with his questions, suggestions, seeking in me and acting as midwife to my thought; but all illuminati and professors, all who talk down or cut our meat into morsels, will quickly be counted aunties by the vigorous boys at school.  Chairs and pulpits totter to-day with a scholastic dry rot, which is inability to recognize the equality of unsophisticated man to man.  There will soon be no more chair or desk; the only eminence will be that of one who can stand with feet on the common level, and still utter over our heads a regenerating word.  We shall learn to address ourselves in an audience, to utter before millions, as if in joyful soliloquy, the sincerest, tenderest thought.  Speak as if to angels, and you shall speak to angels; take unhesitating inmost counsel with mankind.  The response to every pure desire is instant and wonderful.  Thousands listen to-day for a word which waits in the air and has never been spoken, a word of courage to carry forward the purpose of their lives.

Thought points to unity, and the thinker is impatient of squinting and side-glances while all eyes should be turned together to the same.  Thought is growing agreement, and that in which the race cannot meet me is some whim or notion, a personal crotchet, not a cosmic and eternal truth.  Genius is freedom from all oddity, is Catholicity,—­and departure from it so much departure in me from Nature and myself.  We say a man is original, if he lives at first, and not at second hand,—­if he requires a new tombstone,—­if he takes law, not from the many or the few, but from the sky,—­if he is no subordinate, but an authority,—­if he does not borrow judgment, but is judgment.  Such a man is singular in his attitude only because we have so fallen from purity.  He, not the fashion, is comme il faut.  By every word and act he declares that as he is so all men must shortly be.