Plato and Swedenborg are trying to speak the same word, but each can avail only to turn some syllable.  They regret this partiality as a provincial burr, as greenness and narrowness.  Genius sees the white light and regrets its own impurity, though that be piquancy to the multitude, and marketable as a splendid blue or gold.  Manner, in thought, speech, behavior, is popularity and falsehood; is the limping of a king deformity, though it set the fashion of limping.  The grandest thoughts are colorless as water; they savor not of Milton, Socrates, or Menu; seem not drawn from any private cistern, but rain-drops out of the pure sky.  Whim and conceit are tare and tret.  It matters little whether a man whine with Coleridge, or boast with Ben Jonson, or sneer with Byron, or grumble with Carlyle, if every thought is one-sided and warped.  The oddity relieves our commonplace, and pricks the dull palate; but we soon tire of exaggeration, and detest the trick.  It is egotism, self-sickness, jaundice, adulteration of the light.  We name it the subjective habit, personality; while the right illumination is a transparency, a putting-off of shoes, garments, body, and constitution, lest these should intercept or stain the ray.  Genius is an eye single and serene.  Good speech carries the sound of no man’s, of no angel’s voice.  Good writing betrays no man’s hand, but is as if traced by the finger of God.

Original will signify, therefore, not peculiar, but universal.  The original is one who lives from the Maker, not from man.  He has found and asserts himself as a piece of primal design:  he is somewhat, and his life therefore significant.  He first represents man in purity, man in God, and is a revelation.  No matter what he repeats as approved, he will not be a repetition, but will give new value to each thing by his approval.  The wisest man in separate propositions repeats only what has many times been spoken.  In my reading of this past week I find anticipated every item of modern thought.  Hooker says of the Bible,—­“By looking in it for that which it is impossible that any book can have, we lose the benefits which we might reap from its being the best of books.”  Milton says,—­

  “He who reads and to his reading brings not
  A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
  (And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
  Uncertain and unsettled still remains.”

Coleridge gives perfect confidence to paradox as sure of solution above the term of it; in his “Table-Talk” he antedates Carlyle’s doctrine of dynamics,—­puts Faith above belief, as in another region of the mind,—­declares that the conceivable is not to be revered, and says, before Emerson, that existence is the Fall of Man.  But the failure of Coleridge teaches that no single perceptions, however subtile or deep, will solve the broad problem of Nature.  These separate thoughts the great hold in new emphasis and relation.  Of such sparks they make a flame, of such timbers a house or ship.  The parts may be old, the whole is not; and Goethe falls into a modest fallacy, when, in acknowledging his obligation to others, he disclaims originality for himself.  All is new in his use of it:  you may say he has taken nothing, for what was iron or silver where he found it is gold in his transmuting grasp.