But Truth does not share the fortunes of her verbal body. The grand ideas, the master-imaginations and moving faiths of men, run in the blood of the race; and a given degree of pure human heat infallibly brings them out. Not more surely does the rose appear on the rose-bush, or the apple, pear, or peach upon the trees of the orchard, than these fruits of the soul upon nations of powerful and thrifty spirit. For want of vitality the shrub may fail to flower, the tree to bear fruit, and man to bring forth his spiritual product; but if Thought be attained, certain thoughts and imaginations will come of it. Let two nations at opposite sides of the globe, and without intercommunication arrive at equal stages of mental culture, and the language of the one will, on the whole, be equivalent to that of the other, nay, the very rhetoric, the very fancies of the one will, in a broad way of comparison, be tantamount to those of the other. The nearer we get to any past age, the more do we find that the totality of its conceptions and imaginings is much the same with that of our own. There are specific variation and generic unity; and he whom the former blinds to the latter reads the old literatures without eyes, and knows neither his own time nor any other. Owen, Agassiz, Carpenter explain the homologies of anatomy and physiology; but a doctrine of the homologies of thought is equally possible, and will sometime be set forth. The basis, then, of any sufficient doctrine of literature and literary production is found in two statements:-- First, that the perfect truth of the universe issues, by vital representation, into the personality of man. Secondly, that this truth _tends_ in every man, though often in the obscurest way, toward intellectual and artistic expression. Now just so far as by any man's speech we feel ourselves brought into direct relationship with this ever-issuing fact, so far the impressions of originality are produced. That all his words were in the dictionary before he used them,--that all his thoughts, under some form of intimation, were in literature before he arrived at them,--matters not; it is the verity, the vital process, the depth of relationship, which concerns us.