en spiced with the frantic passion
and violent coloring of inferior but popular writers. For they are poets
by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which through
their eyes beholds again and blesses the things which it hath made.
The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its works. The
great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of
his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to
despise all he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty strain of
intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and
we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in
other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger
hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock.
The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter
things as good from day to day for ever. Why then should I make account
of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the soul from which they fell as
syllables from the tongue?

This energy does not descend into individual life on any other condition
than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to
whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight;
it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see those whom it inhabits,
we are apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that inspiration the
man comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk with men with an
eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us to be plain and
true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish his life by quoting my
lord and the prince and the countess, who thus said or did to him.
The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons and brooches and rings, and
preserve their cards and compliments. The more cultivated, in their
account of their own experience, cull out the pleasing, poetic
circumstance,--the visit to Rome, the man of genius they saw, the
brilliant friend They know; still further on perhaps the gorgeous
landscape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they enjoyed
yesterday,--and so seek to throw a romantic color over their life. But
the soul that ascends to worship the great God is plain and true; has no
rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures; does not want
admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the earnest experience
of the common day,--by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle
having becom