original man;--not a second-hand,
borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On
such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but
honestly on that;--on the reality and substance which Nature gives _us_,
not on the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us--!

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there
ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was
really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive,
reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I
could not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That the
sincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World
of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of
_originality_ is not that it be _new_: Johnson believed altogether in
the old; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit for him; and in
a right heroic manner lived under them. He is well worth study in regard
to that. For we are to say that Johnson was far other than a mere man
of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and facts. He stood by the
old formulas; the happier was it for him that he could so stand: but in
all formulas that _he_ could stand by, there needed to be a most
genuine substance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so barren,
artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, the great Fact of
this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable, unspeakable,
divine-infernal, upon this man too! How he harmonized his Formulas with
it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: that is a thing
worth seeing. A thing "to be looked at with reverence, with pity, with
awe." That Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still _worshipped_
in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.

It was in virtue of his _sincerity_, of his speaking still in some sort
from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that
Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dialects "artificial"? Artificial
things are not all false;--nay every true Product of Nature will
infallibly _shape_ itself; we may say all artificial things are, at
the starting of them, _true_. What we call "Formulas" are not in their
origin bad; they are indispensably good. Formula is _method_, habitude;
found wherever man is found. Formulas fashion themselves as Paths do, as
beaten Highways, leading toward some sacred or high objec