![]() ![]() Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.Īccept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. In the attempt his genius deserts him no muse befriends no invention, no hope. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. ![]() We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. PILLARS OF INMOST LIGHT FULLThere is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance that imitation is suicide that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. ![]() Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,- and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. ![]()
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