he ideals, the activities of the next generation, writes out
the specifications for the joys and sorrows of a world, and lays the
ground-plans of nations because he has an inspired mind. It is really
because he has an inspired body, a body that has received its orders
once for all, from his spirit. We would never wonder that everything a
genius does has that vivid and strange reality it has, if we realized
what his body is doing for him, how he has a body which is at work
automatically drinking up the earth into everything he thinks, drinking
up practicability, art and technique for him into everything he sees and
everything he hopes and desires. And every year he keeps on adding a new
body, keeps on handing down to his basement new sets, every day, of
finer and yet finer things to do automatically. The great spiritual
genius becomes great by economizing his consciousness in one direction
and letting it fare forth in another. He converts his old inspirations
into his new machines. He converts heat into power, and power into
light, and comes to live at last as almost any man of genius can really
be seen living--in a kind of transfigured or lighted-up body. The poet
transmutes his subconscious or machine body into words; and the artist,
into colour or sound or into carved stone. The engineer transmutes his
subconscious body into long buildings, into aisles of windows, into
stories of thoughtful machines. Every great spiritual and imaginative
genius is seen, sooner or later, to be the transmuted genius of some
man's body. The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious,
high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled up in
his mind for him, and handed over to him for the use of his soul, would
have made a genius out of anybody. It is not as if he had had to work
out every day all the old details of being a genius, himself.

The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him because of
his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory
of sensuous machinery. It is as if he had practically a thousand men all
working for him, for dear life, down in his basement, and the things
that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with
which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. We call him
inspired because he is more mechanical than we are, and because his real
spiritual life begins where our lives leave off.

So the poets who have filled the world with