The poet is one who has detected this latency of power in every breast. His delight is a feeling that all doors are open to all, that he is no favorite, but the rest are late sleepers, and he only earlier awake. Depth of genius is measured by depth of this conviction. Egotism is incurable greenness. An artist is one who has more, not less, respect for the common eye. The seer points always from his own to a public privilege,--says never, "I, Jesus, have so received," but, "The Son of Man must so receive"; and Shakspeare cuts himself into fragments till there is no Shakspeare left behind, as if expressly to testify that this wonderful wisdom is not his, but ours, is not that of the thinker and penman in his study, but of priests and kings, ladies and courtiers, lovers and warriors, knaves and fools. Paul sees that Moses read his law from tables of the heart. Every wise word is an echo of the wisdom inarticulate in our neighbors which sends them confident about their work and play. The faith of healthy men and women is amazing when we learn how incapable they are of showing grounds for it. In speculation they hold horrible theories, blackening the day; yet they trust the good which their lips unwittingly deny. In discourse we are moved, not by what a man says, but by what he takes for granted. The undertow of power is something unstated to which all his facts and laws refer. But our resource seems to be rather a reversion, is not quite available; we have blood and a beat at the heart, yet it does not circulate freely, and Nature to every man is a double of himself, so that the universe seems also cold in extremities, as though there were too little original life to fill her veins. The poet is not fire on the hearth to thaw this numbness by foreign heat. He rubs and rouses us to activity, drags us to the open air, puts us on a glowing chase, provokes us to race and climb with him till we also are thoroughly alive. No other gift of his is worth much beside this hope of reaching his side. The great know well that all men are approaching their view even in departing from it, as travellers going from one port turn their backs on each other here and their faces together toward the antipodal point: they can leave their discoveries and fame to the race. There is one object of sight. Every piece of wisdom is no less my thought because another has found it in my mind. It is more mine than any perception I called my own, for really with that I have unconsciously been living in deeps below thought. The rest I have known, that in all these years I am.