I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. Always the soul hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil
is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own
thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is
true for all men,--that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it
shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the
outmost--and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of
the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the
highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at
naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they
thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the
firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his
thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than
this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on
the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good
sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall
be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the
wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to
him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given