appiest performance is too nearly of
the same color with their permanent consciousness to be seen in relief:
work less sincere--that is, more related and bound to some partial state
or particular mood--would stand out more to the eye of the doer. To this
error he will be less exposed who learns--as most assuredly every artist
should--to estimate his work, not as it seems to him _striking_, but as
it echoes to his ear the earliest murmurs of his childhood, and reclaims
for the heart its wandered memories. Perhaps it is common for one's
happiest thoughts, in the moment of their apparition in words, to affect
him with a gentle surprise and sense of newness; but soon afterwards
they may probably come to touch him, on the contrary, with a vague
sense of reminiscence, as if his mother had sung them by his cradle, or
somewhere under the rosy east of life he had heard them from others.
A statement of our own which seems to us _very_ new and striking is
probably partial, is in some degree foreign to our hearts; that which
one, being the soul he is, could not do otherwise than say is probably
what he was created for the purpose of saying, and will be found his
most significant and living word. Yet just in proportion as one's speech
is a pure and simple efflux of his spirit, just in proportion as its
utterance lies in the order and inevitable procedure of his life, he
will be _liable_ to undervalue it. Who feels that the universe is
greatly enriched by his heart-beats?--that it is much that he breathes,
sleeps, walks? But the breaths of supreme genius are thoughts, and the
imaginations that people its day-world are more familiar to it than the
common dreams of sleepers to them, and the travel of its meditations is
daily and customary; insomuch that the very thought of all others which
one was born to utter he may _forget_ to mention, as presuming it to be
no news. Indeed, if a man of fertile soul be misled into the luckless
search after peculiar and surprising thoughts, there are many chances
that be will be betrayed into this oversight of his proper errand. As
Sir Martin Frobisher, according to Fuller, brought home from America a
cargo of precious stones which after examination were thrown out to mend
roads with, so he leaves untouched his divine knowledges, and comes
sailing into port full-freighted with conceits.

May not the above considerations go far to explain that indifference,
otherwise so astonishing, with which Shakspear