In no other way than this, it seems to me, can art and morality be brought into harmony. Art bears witness to the presence in us of something purer and loftier than anything of which we can be individually conscious. Its complete expression we call inspiration; and he who is the subject of the inspiration can account no better than any one else for the result which art accomplishes through him. The perfect poem is found, not made; the mind which utters it did not invent it. Art takes all nature and all knowledge for her province; but she does not leave it as she found it; by the divine necessity that is upon her, she breathes a soul into her materials, and organizes chaos into form. But never, under any circumstances, does she deign to minister to our selfish personal hope or greed. She shows us how to love our neighbor, never ourselves. Shakspeare, Homer, Phidias, Raphael, were no Pharisees--at least in so far as they were artists; nor did any one ever find in their works any countenance for that inhuman assumption--"I am holier than thou!" In the world's darkest hours, art has sometimes stood as the sole witness of the nobler life that was in eclipse. Civilizations arise and vanish; forms of religion hold sway and are forgotten; learning and science advance and gather strength; but true art was as great and as beautiful three thousand years ago as it is to-day. We are prone to confound the man with the artist, and to suppose that he is artistic by possession and inheritance, instead of exclusively by dint of what he does. No artist worthy the name ever dreams of putting himself into his work, but only what is infinitely distinct from and other than himself. It is not the poet who brings forth the poem, but the poem that begets the poet; it makes him, educates him, creates in him the poetic faculty. Those whom we call great men, the heroes of history, are but the organs of great crises and opportunities: as Emerson has said, they are the most indebted men. In themselves they are not great; there is no ratio between their achievements and them. Our judgment is misled; we do not discriminate between the divine purpose and the human instrument. When we listen to Napoleon fretting his soul away at Elba, or to Carlyle wrangling with his wife at Chelsea, we are shocked at the discrepancy between the lofty public performance and the petty domestic shortcoming. Yet we do wrong to blame them; the nature of which they are examples is the same nature that is shared also by the publican and the sinner.