rew immortal while he stooped behind his plough. These are gone; but
the hall, the farmer's fireside, the hut, perhaps the palace, the
counting-room, the workshop, the village, the city, life's high places
and low ones, may all produce their poets, whom a common temperament
pervades like an electric sympathy. Peer or ploughman, we will muster
them pair by pair and shoulder to shoulder. Even society, in its most
artificial state, consents to this arrangement. These factory girls
from Lowell shall mate themselves with the pride of drawing-rooms and
literary circles, the bluebells in fashion's nosegay, the Sapphos, and
Montagues, and Nortons of the age. Other modes of intellect bring
together as strange companies. Silk-gowned professor of languages, give
your arm to this sturdy blacksmith, and deem yourself honored by the
conjunction, though you behold him grimy from the anvil. All varieties
of human speech are like his mother tongue to this rare man.
Indiscriminately let those take their places, of whatever rank they
come, who possess the kingly gifts to lead armies or to sway a
people--Nature's generals, her lawgivers, her kings, and with them also
the deep philosophers who think the thought in one generation that is
to revolutionize society in the next. With the hereditary legislator in
whom eloquence is a far-descended attainment--a rich echo repeated by
powerful voices from Cicero downward--we will match some wondrous
backwoodsman, who has caught a wild power of language from the breeze
among his native forest boughs. But we may safely leave these brethren
and sisterhood to settle their own congenialities. Our ordinary
distinctions become so trifling, so impalpable, so ridiculously
visionary, in comparison with a classification founded on truth, that
all talk about the matter is immediately a common place.

Yet the longer I reflect the less am I satisfied with the idea of
forming a separate class of mankind on the basis of high intellectual
power. At best it is but a higher development of innate gifts common to
all. Perhaps, moreover, he whose genius appears deepest and truest
excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws
out occasionally a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is
profoundly, though unutterably, conscious. Therefore, though we suffer
the brotherhood of intellect to march onward together, it may be
doubted whether their peculiar relation will not begin to vanish as
soon