ships no less broad and cosmical, and an evolution
implying the like industries, veritable and precious beyond all scope of
affirmation. Even if we quite overlook its pre-personal ancestry, still
the roots it has in its immediate author will be of unmeasured depth,
and it will still proceed toward its consummate form by energies and
assiduities that beggar the estimation of all ordinary toil. With the
birth of the man himself was it first born, and to the time of its
perfect growth and birth into speech the burden of it was borne by every
ruddy drop of his heart's blood, by every vigor of his body,--nerve
and artery, eye and ear, and all the admirable servitors of the soul,
steadily bringing to that invisible matrix where it houses their
costly nutriments, their sacred offices; while every part and act of
experience, every gush of jubilance, every stifle of woe, all sweet
pangs of love and pity, all high breathings of faith and resolve,
contribute to the form and bloom it finally wears. Yet the more profound
and necessary product of one's spirit it is, the more likely at last
to fall softly from him,--so softly, perhaps, that he himself shall be
half-unaware when the separation occurs.

And such only are men of genius as accomplish this divine utterance.
The voice itself may be strong or tiny,--that of a seraph, or that of a
song-sparrow; the range and power of combination may be Beethoven's, or
only such as are found in the hum of bees; but in this genuineness, this
depth of ancestry and purity of growth, this unmistakable issue under
the patronage of Nature, there is a test of genius that cannot vary. He
is not inimitable who imitates. He that speaks only what he has learned
speaks what the world will not long or greatly desire to learn from him.
"Shakspeare," said Dryden, not having the fear of Locke before his eyes,
"was naturally learned"; but whoever is quite destitute of natural
learning will never achieve winged words by dint and travail of other
erudition. If his soul have not been to school before coming to his
body, it is late in life for him to qualify himself for a teacher of
mankind. Words that are cups to contain the last essences of a sincere
life bear elixirs of life for as many lips as shall touch their brim;
they refresh all generations, nor by any quaffing of generations are
they to be drained.

To this ease it may be owing that poets and artists are often so ill
judges of their own success. Their h