ek:
tryphes, habrotetos, chlides, chariton, himerou pothou pater], is
itself the Sangraal of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his
passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his
faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, may still be
ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of
our life.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1803-1882

SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET. 1850.

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of
sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is
the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is
nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with
the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have
any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice
to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,
'I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:
to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a
new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a
new mechanic power:' no, but he finds himself in the river of the
thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his
contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and
their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The
church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the
advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her
chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by
trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
production to the place of consumption