Dark. Failing this, it loses its nature and becomes talent,
according to the definition,--mere skill in attaining vulgar
ends. A certain wonderful friend of mine said that "a false
priest is the falsest of false things." But what makes the
priest? A cassock? O Diogenes! Or the power (and thence the
call) to teach man's duties as they flow from the Superhuman? Is
not he who perceives and proclaims the Superhumanities, he who
has once intelligently pronounced the words "Self-Renouncement,"
"Invisible Leader," "Heavenly Powers of Sorrow," and so on,
forever the liege of the same?

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* Emerson uniformly spells this name "Teufelsdroch."
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Then to write luxuriously is not the same thing as to live so,
but a new and worse offence. It implies an intellectual defect
also, the not perceiving that the present corrupt condition of
human nature (which condition this harlot muse helps to
perpetuate) is a temporary or superficial state. The good word
lasts forever: the impure word can only buoy itself in the gross
gas that now envelops us, and will sink altogether to ground as
that works itself clear in the everlasting effort of God.

May I not call it temporary? for when I ascend into the pure
region of truth (or under my undermost garment, as Epictetus and
Teufelsdrockh would say), I see that to abide inviolate, although
all men fall away from it; yea, though the whole generation of
Adam should be healed as a sore off the face of the creation.
So, my friend, live Socrates and Milton, those starch Puritans,